


Having Fallen

by LittleRedCosette



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Character Death, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Homophobic Language, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, Violence, Violent Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-29 03:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14464266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: There’s a pause that in hindsight will seem like a minute, but really is barely a second.Then a gun goes off, and Eames’ world falls mercilessly  out from beneath him.





	1. First

**Author's Note:**

> To be perfectly honest, I have no words for how sorry I am about this fic. This is going to be very similar and very different from my other pieces. Tags will probably be added. It is DARK.
> 
> Also, my non-linear approach is totally out of control here...
> 
> I have no idea how long it will be, but for some reason, the chapters have demanded to be much, much shorter than my usual style. Ten is a guess at this point.
> 
> A little review would be a lot welcome! Thanks a million, bonnie kids.
> 
> Yours always,
> 
> LRCx

_Th_ e _only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet._

_~ Nikos Kazantzakis_

.

.

The chemist is unreliable.

Eames doesn’t notice at first. Once he begins to suspect as much, it colours his every feeling, sparks discomfort in his gut like flies in a broken web.

“Annabel, minus the Lee,” she introduces herself with coy pride.

It makes him smile. That unreal, twee smile that people like because it shows effort.

It says _I don’t find you funny, but I’ll smile at you anyway because I know you’re trying._

She’s fox red with blue eyes that blink a lot behind fat rimmed glasses. She uses more words than necessary and at half the volume of comfortable conversation, which suggests flirtation. It makes Eames’ skin crawl.

The Architect’s noticed, too. They exchange looks over blueprints; dark, distrustful glowers.

Eames might feel hypocritical about his concern. He’s normally the least reliable member of his team at any given time, but not today, and that makes him nervous. Even at his worst, he's always been a rogue variable, never a wildcard.

Contrary to what his history of gambling suggests, he doesn't like wildcards.

Annabel minus-the-Lee, she speaks with that quick, quiet lullaby voice and Eames feels his heart itch inside his chest.

It’s the fifth day. He is watching the mark as he eats a rapid business lunch. Eames picks through his salad with his fork, turning over each rocket leaf with caution, separating all the pine nuts into a cluster in the centre of the plate.

“You’re being paranoid,” Arthur says brusquely from across the table.

He’s wearing a purple tie, the one Eames bought him at Gatwick as a sorry for throwing mustard at his old one.

Eames stares down at his salad, the mark’s reedy voice carrying through the room to his straining ears.

He stabs at a cherry tomato half and the seeds spurt out in every direction.

Arthur sighs quietly to himself. Picks a piece of blue fluff off the knot of his tie and lets it float to the floor at their feet.

.

.

It’s not like Eames _hadn’t noticed_ before the Fischer Job.

There’d been the Welminski Job, with those gruelling hours in subzero temperatures and the Architect who didn’t inform them of the labyrinth he’d built into the prison.

Johannesburg with the stash of blood diamonds the Extractor conveniently forgot to mention and Plovdiv with the bar fight that left them stuck in a cell overnight.

And the first time, the very first job, when Eames looked up from his cup of tea and barked, _Who brought the twink?_

Cobb had hissed under his breath _That’s Arthur, my Point Man._

Eames had laughed too loudly to be merely impolite. Even back then, Arthur had radiated a bizarre, obstinate competence, the kind that belonged to World War Two posters and political campaign aides.

He hadn’t acknowledged Eames’ blatant disregard for his youth the first time, nor the second.

The third time, he’d hotly jabbed at Eames’ unprofessional manner and general lack of proven worth, then blushed at the scolding look Cobb threw him.

Eames had enjoyed the flush in his cheeks, the ruffled brightness of his eyes. He’d always entertained the idea that when he finally did fuck the belligerence out of dreamshare’s most resilient Point Man, it would be fierce and quick and probably the angriest, loudest sex of his life.

But then they flew the lifetime flight, the Sydney to Los Angeles with a dead body in the storage and a passively grieving son in First Class.

It was not a coincidence that Eames was the last one to leave the Arrivals Gate.

Nevertheless, it was happy serendipity that brought him to the taxi rank in time to see Arthur standing there, a stranded stray, looking so lost and quiet with his lightweight bags and heavy shoulders.

Eames had walked right up to him, placed a hand firmly on his lower back and said with guiding confidence,

“This way, Arthur. Come with me.”

And to his astonishment, Arthur did.

.

.

So it began, until it ended.

.

.

“Crowley’s emailed about a job in Tuscany,” Arthur says.

Eames grunts _No_ and leans his nose closer to the papers laid out on the dining room table as he shades in the girl’s hair. She’ll be backup material at best, but it’s been awhile since he created a new face from scratch. The art of forging remains low supply, high demand, but it’s all copy-copy-copy these days.

He’s always been easily bored.

“You like Tuscany,” Arthur grumbles from behind his laptop on the other side of the table.

“Not as much as I dislike Crowley,” Eames retorts without looking up.

Pencil tickles his nose and he twitches his face, making it worse.

They’re in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in a house that is tentatively _theirs._ It’s a compromise that took surprisingly little effort, to say their taste in homes is as disparate as their dreams.

The gravitational pull of _them_ that began at the completion of the Fischer Job has solidified into something astounding, something solid and trustworthy as bedrock. Those two weeks in California unglued something that had separated them, some barrier of disapproval that had once wrenched them apart.

(They had eventually reached fierce, quick sex and yes, it had been the angriest, loudest sex of Eames’ life.)

“It’s three weeks, and he needs two forges.”

Eames looks up from the page, scoffing.

“You honestly think you’ll sell this to me with _extra work?_ Know your audience, love,” he chuckles.

Arthur twists his mouth, rueful and irritated as he mutters indistinctly. There’s a loud scrape of his chair pushed back and he slinks around the table to drape his arms over Eames’ shoulders, his forehead pressing into the back of his head.

His mouth is wet at Eames’ hairline, his fingers strong digging into the meat of his pectorals, like he might sink them straight into his lungs, take his breath in his bare hands.

 _“I_ like Tuscany,” Arthur mumbles grouchily.

Eames can’t stop the smirk that stretches through his mouth, deep as a yawn and twice as lazy.

He stops drawing to better enjoy the rolling press of those strong thumbs in the crook below his collarbones.

“I know you do,” he replies, tilting into Arthur’s face as he feels the scrape of teeth on his neck.

“Maybe I’ll just go myself,” Arthur threatens lightly, and his weight dips heavier over Eames.

Eames laughs, dropping his pencil and reaching back to take hold of the back of Arthur’s head and coax him firmly around to his throat.

Arthur goes willingly, his tongue teasing between nips of his teeth.

Eames can feel himself being persuaded.

“You wouldn’t last five minutes with Crowley without me.”

Arthur scoffs at this, and when he speaks the words buzz over Eames’ jugular.

“I did perfectly well by myself for twenty-nine years, you know.”

Eames leans his head back and catches Arthur’s jaw with a kiss. He’s stubbly, sharp-boned and very warm.

“Probably shouldn’t risk it, though,” he mumbles. “Just in case.”

When Arthur opens his mouth to retort, Eames takes his bottom lip in his teeth and bites just a little too hard.

The quiet spell breaks. Arthur gasps as his tongue scrapes over Eames’.

Outside, two chaffinches squabble loudly on the window ledge.

Down the hallway, the front doorbell rings.

.

.

“I’ve got a student who could use some tutoring in forging,” Dom tells him.

They’re in Houston, which is the furthest from home Dom has agreed to go for a job without his children since he was delivered back to them by his very relieved father-in-law.

Eames gets the impression that Dom’s afraid if he ever leaves the country again, he won’t be allowed back this time. Or maybe it’s his children who are afraid of that.

He’s put on weight and his hair is shorter and he looks good, looks like a man who works long hours behind a desk and still scrounges time for lunchboxes and trips to the zoo and bedtime stories.

This isn’t the first time NASA has contracted his academic support, but it’s the first time he’s called Eames about it.

They drink coffee in the half-furnished office they’ve provided, full of boxes of dusty arch files and a huge whiteboard on one wall that’s covered in purple and red smudges where the pens have smeared.

“What possible reason could a budding astronaut have to forge?” Eames replies, crossing one ankle over his knee and tapping the rim of his mug, almost cold by now.

Dom gives him an exasperated look.

“Not here,” he says in his most _teachery_ voice. “Back in California. She’s bright, creative, very keen to learn. She’s good enough at architecture, but I have a feeling it’s not her true vocation.”

Eames licks his lips, feels his jaw unhinging as he bites back his initial retort.

“You would consider any of this a vocation?” he asks in a low, cautious voice.

By some miracle, he manages not to sneer at first.

But then Dom opens his big fat mouth and says with such childlike innocence, as if he didn’t once watch his wife plummet wilfully to her death,

“Of course it is.”

“Oh, _Dom,”_ Eames snarls with disdain, shifting uncomfortably and putting his coffee down on the desk to remove the temptation to splash it in the other man’s face.

He feels the itch again, that phantom finger crawl up the knobs of his spine and hollow pockets in his gut, like he might actually throw up at such rotten sugarcane sentiment.

Dom, who should know better, who does know better.

Dom, who used to be _Cobb_ yet somehow he’s carved himself a new place in Eames’ decimated circle of trust.

Dom, who leans forward to explain himself in that tone of justifiable authority.

Eames doesn’t hear a word of it.

He closes his eyes, feels the spasm of distress in the muscles of his cheeks and mouth, the ache of it.

Unbidden, tattooed into his eyelids, he sees Arthur’s tear stricken face. The blood on his chin as he whispered, _Close your eyes._

Eames stands abruptly, silencing Dom’s rolling words.

Dom leans back to look up at him, defeat in his eyes.

“I’m not going to teach anyone how to forge,” Eames says, hears the strangling in his own voice like the snick of a blade in his mouth. “And this isn’t a vocation. It’s a fucking suicide pact.”

He leaves hastily, his ears burning and his throat constricted with rage. Doesn’t respond to his name as it’s shouted after him like a curse word, like a plea for mercy.

This is the point when he’d call Arthur. There'd be bickering and inconstant mutters of dismay. A swift condemnation flooding him, sunshine sharp and he'd laugh it off, rain in April.

But he doesn't, he doesn't call Arthur. He can’t, because there’s nobody to call.

Arthur isn’t here anymore.

.

.


	2. Second

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goodness gracious me, the quickest update of all time from me! I am starting to see the appeal to small chapters....
> 
> Thank you so much for your kind reviews and kudos, I'm glad to have a few fellows on this ride.
> 
> Yours,  
> LRCx

_What’s left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars._

_~ Bertolt Brecht_

.

.

Three days after the Fischer Job, Eames finally wakes up at a reasonable hour.

What constitutes as a reasonable hour remains somewhat subjective, however, and he knows eleven forty-seven isn’t exactly reasonable.

It matters not, of course. The jetlag has gently negotiated with his circadian rhythms and he feels fully awake for the first time since he left Paris for Sydney the day after Maurice Fischer died.

Disturbed by a loud chattering sound of plastic, he sees Arthur sitting at the hotel desk wearing only a pair of boxers as he taps at his laptop.

Eames watches him with lazy, smug fondness. In side profile, Arthur’s scowl looks far less cross, closer to a pout, which is categorically adorable.

“Good morning,” the pouting frown in question says without looking away from his laptop screen.

Eames rolls over the pillows to the now cold side of the bed. He glances at the clock on the cabinet and smiles.

“Barely,” he murmurs.

Arthur’s mouth twitches.

“We should check out today,” he says in his most dismissive, businesslike tone.

Startled, Eames feels a jilted tug in his gut. He blinks, blanketing his disappointment in cool curiosity.

“Got a job already?” he tries to tease, but it comes out too quiet, too close to suspicion.

Arthur throws him a rumpled look of disdain. It cuts surprisingly deep, to say it’s a look he’s been giving Eames regularly since they first met.

“No,” he snorts.

This, somehow, only makes Eames feel even worse.

Sliding heavily out of the covers, Eames scrapes his fingers through his hair.

“I’ll shower, then,” he says. He doesn’t mean it come out quite so grumpily, but the distinct edge of vehemence is there nonetheless.

For some reason this makes Arthur look at him with a bizarre, tilted grin. He laughs inexplicably, a tiny staccato of breaths and Eames tries not to acknowledge the irritation in his chest, though the sting of Arthur’s indifferent amusement trails after him into the bathroom, like a particularly persistent hornet.

Jabbing the shower on, Eames steps in without waiting, the cool water hitting his dry scalp and sending a tremor through his spine as it soaks over the crown of his head.

He’s embarrassed by the churning disappointment that’s bubbling under his skin.

What does it matter that three days is enough for Arthur? Eames has left people before the endorphin rush has finished ravaging his body. He’s fucked people without even fully satisfying himself just to get away quicker.

Three days with Arthur is already the longest sexual relationship he’s had in years. It should be plenty, should in fact be boring already.

The water’s slowly steaming to a burn, and Eames covers himself in shampoo as if he might soap himself into inexistence.

He can still hear that gipping, yearning whimper that had fallen out of Arthur’s mouth as he crowded him close at the airport taxi rank. The way for once he curled inwards instead of recoiling into his own personal space, and smiled with those glittering honey eyes in the inky blanket of night.

Eames grits his teeth and pushes the memories away with violence. There’s no point in wishful thinking, and he resolves to accept this turn of events the way he accepts everything else, gin martini dry and sullen smug.

If Arthur’s done, then so is Eames.

He finishes scrubbing suds out of his hair and dries himself quickly. The towel’s too soft and the air is very hot, he's feeling fussy and hurt and more than a little embarrassed.

As he steps out of the bathroom, his shirt hits him in the chest.

“Thought you’d drowned,” Arthur mutters, so quickly Eames can’t tell if he’s angry or amused.

His eyes follow Arthur as he finishes packing their bags.

He’s dressed in a pair of charcoal trousers and a blue shirt that’s too big for him, too big because it belongs to Eames.

Eames’ brain misfires a few neurons. He knows, because he feels them scattering through his skull, ricocheting like the first rocks of an avalanche down a steep slope.

“Hurry up,” Arthur says impatiently.

Eames considers pointing out Arthur’s thievery, but he doesn’t want to dispel whatever illusion is forming in his midst. Possessiveness is such an unattractive quality, yet Eames can feel it roaring in his gut at the sight of Arthur drowning in that blue cotton.

He dresses quickly, his eyes not leaving Arthur’s sharp movements until he looks down and sees he’s buttoned his shirt wrong.

“You’re hopeless,” Arthur tells him.

He refrains from agreeing out loud, just stands very still while Arthur steps deliberately too close to re-button his shirt for him.

Eames studies the thick eyelashes fluttering around Arthur’s eyes, the very faint freckles on his forehead.

“Ready to go?” Arthur asks all too soon, stepping away far easier than Eames likes.

Eames nods silently and swallows whatever feeble words his mind musters.

Arthur leads the way out with as much confidence as Eames had led them in three days ago.

The taxi rank is full, of course, and Eames refuses to feel the jab of desperation in his upper chest as Arthur approaches the front one, nodding to the cabbie as he hands over his bags and opens the backseat door.

Eames hovers near the hotel entrance, watching.

Refusal sits coppery on his tongue. He wants to call out, to insist _just one more day_ but pride sticks like caramel on his lips. He won’t stoop to begging.

He hasn’t chased a lover like some needy puppy since he was twenty-two and heartbroken by the back of Helena’s head as she left the last time. He won’t now, won’t degrade himself for anyone, not even for Arthur.

Arthur, who’s stronger than his lithe frame implies, gentler than his fondness for automatic weapons suggests. He must -

“What are you waiting for?” Arthur shouts, interrupting the tidal panic of Eames’ thoughts.

Eames blinks.

Arthur’s staring at him reproachfully. He indicates the cabbie before sliding into the back. As he turns away, Eames is fairly certain he catches a long-suffering roll of those dark hazel eyes.

Without putting too much thought into it, Eames hurriedly throws his case into the boot and joins Arthur in the back, trying not to stare too hard.

A strained, anxious silence pervades the taxi. Even the driver seems to sense it as he starts the car, mumbling only the briefest of offers about it being a good day for the tourists, for which he receives only a grunt from his passengers.

Eames wishes he’d stood close enough to hear Arthur give an address. He feels foolish asking now, and Eames, he can stand a lot of things, but feeling foolish isn’t one of them.

Arthur’s lips are pressed thin. His eyes drift occasionally to Eames’ knees and he goes as far as to open his mouth to speak a few times, though he never quite follows through.

The car snakes out of the crowded centre of LA.

Eames’ knowledge of Los Angeles is rudimentary at best, owing to his general dislike of anywhere that isn’t in Africa or Southeast Asia. All the same, it doesn’t take long to realise they are heading into Pasadena.

Arthur’s jaw is locked by the time they pull up outside a generously sized series of apartment blocks and his face is paler than when they left.

Eames narrows his eyes warily, stepping out to dutifully fetch the cases while Arthur pays.

The sun is mercilessly bright, washing out the whole street, even Arthur, once he too is standing on the pavement.

As the cab drives away, Eames turns to his ruffled companion, who is doing a very bad job of looking at ease.

“Where are we?”

Arthur raises his eyebrows high.

“Pasadena,” he replies, which is about as infuriatingly facetious as Arthur gets.

“Why are we here?” Eames demands instead of congratulating him on his wit, as he might otherwise have done. “I thought you didn’t have a job.”

Arthur pulls a bemused face, and an odd look of realisation washes over him. A sound that is probably a distant relative of laughter echoes out of him.

“I don’t,” he says, stepping closer to Eames. Then, with something akin to embarrassment in his eyes, “I live here.”

Eames doesn’t exactly _yelp,_ per say. Nevertheless, a whooping belly deep sound escapes him.

Something wild and unnameable bursts inside his chest, ferocious as lava. Arthur’s looking at him like he’s grown an extra head but Eames, he just grins so wide his cheeks hurt.

“You had me fork out for a hotel when you live _twenty minutes_ away?”

Arthur shrugs, and there’s a schoolboy twist to the way he squirms where he stands.

“It was a nice hotel,” he says, the tucked corners of his lips revealing a low key embarrassment that Eames doesn’t question.

Eames thinks it’s all too possible that if he hadn’t shepherded him to a hotel that day, Arthur could well have have just found himself another long haul flight instead, not ready to fall into the pit of a hangover awaiting his realisation that he’s free of the clutches of Dominick Cobb’s unreliable genius.

Disguised by the steely resilience of his cleverness, Arthur is in fact, Eames is coming to realise, a bruised heart of hopefulness.

Now, Arthur makes an aborted move to reach for Eames, then turns to the nearest door, with its row of tenant doorbells. Apartment 3A is listed as _MILLER_ and Eames laughs.

“So you _do_ have a sense of humour lurking in that head of yours,” he teases, just to see Arthur blush a faint shade of pink.

Arthur takes a vice tight hold of Eames’ shirt, pulls weak as a child to bring him into the foyer of the building. The bags clatter after them, mostly forgotten.

“Did you honestly think I was anywhere near done with you?” he asks slyly.

Eames looks down at the white-knuckled grip Arthur has on him. The foyer is a little dark and cold, but Arthur’s smile is warm.

“I am quite hopeless, you know,” he reminds Arthur.

And Arthur, he laughs, roses and thorns.

Kisses him with bruising force.

.

.

When it happens, Arthur doesn’t so much die as cease.

Torn from this world by the hands of lesser men. Men who are cruel, who are hungry, who are nothing more than the price they are paid to paint their hands with the red wet of others.

And Eames, he can only watch them do it.

.

.

Annabel not-Lee, with her fox hair and her ocean eyes, makes notes on photographs with a ballpoint pen.

Out of the corner of his eye Eames can see Arthur seething. His anxiety at the pen marks on the glossy finish is palpable.

Eames is honestly a little baffled as to why a chemist needs to have access to the photos in the first place.

His suspicion rises like steam from a cup, swirling in erratic patterns of twisted concern.

Across the table from where he sits, the Extractor, a thickset balding man called Howden, is talking over the plan, as outlined by him while in his most tyrannical of moods.

They’ll take the mark down into a normal workday, full of meetings and phone calls, which will be interrupted by a break-in at the bank where he cashes mysterious monthly cheques to an account listed to an address in New Zealand.

Eames, wearing the face of the mark’s secretary, will be there to witness everything he does next.

There are a lot of undependable variables here that Eames doesn’t like, not least of which being the lack of evidence to suggest their mark regularly tells his secretary anything worthy of note.

His doubts have already been shot down once, though, and he’ll get a reputation if he makes too much of a fuss.

(And in any case, it’s always so satisfying to say _I told you so,_ even while trapped in a collapsing dream.)

(Conceited, he’s heard them say, and he isn’t sure why they think that’s an insult.)

Howden drones on with hawkish confidence while Eames taps his foot under the table.

Beside him, Arthur stares with aggressive energy at his face. He can feel it staining his cheek with a blush. He leans further into the table to listen to Howden’s plan, just in time to hear him say,

“Eames, how well do you think you can forge the Senior Accounts Manager?”

Arthur lets out a tiny chuffing laugh, a half sound of a bird’s chatter, which Eames promptly ignores.

He grimaces, casting back to picture the man in question.

Soft-footed, Welsh, a raggedy brown beard. A wedding ring that hasn’t been well taken care of, a cigarette burn just below his left eye.

“At a push, give me a couple of days and I’ll have him.”

Howden nods, as if to say _See?_ to the Architect, who is wearing a disbelieving expression.

Eames is fairly certain the Architect’s disbelief is at Howden having the gall to ask, rather than at the prospect of Eames’ ability to come up with the goods.

“Two days?” Arthur scoffs quietly. “You’re slipping, Mr Eames.”

“I want to see your progress on that tomorrow morning,” Howden says over Arthur's gentle snicker.

With a low grunt Eames stands quickly, feels sweat oozing out of him and aggravation gritty on his tongue.

He stamps to the kitchen to make tea, just for something to do.

While he clatters as loudly as he can through the cupboards, he hears a dry, patronising voice behind him.

“I told you not to take this job.”

Eames flinches. The sugar slips out of his hands, scattering into frosty sheets over the worktop.

“You’re dead,” he snaps. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Turning his head to his shoulder, he sees in the doorway behind him a neat suit, arms folded and that lithe body leaning against the wooden frame.

His eyes burn and the half empty sugar packet is heavy in his trembling hands.

The kettle groans as it clicks to a boil.

Arthur steps forward. Silent, close, cold.

“Maybe you are, too,” he suggests.

Eames closes his eyes, biting his lip hard.

There’s a cracking sound of broken glass, a doorbell ringing in his ears.

“Arthur,” he murmurs, but when he opens his eyes there is only an empty kitchen, the kettle rattling and sugar glittering across the counter.

.

.

He wonders sometimes if he is asleep. If he has dropped singularly into Limbo.

If his totem is broken and all the mirrors fake.

He wonders if he is mad.

The ghost of Arthur follows him with the kind of loyalty he only ever hinted at in life.

Eames feels the biting longing, like they left the knife blade between his ribs when they stitched him back up.

.

.

By the time he wakes up in the hospital, Henry is there.

He’s wearing a ridiculous buttoned coat, with horn rimmed glasses perched badly on his Rugby League nose, his dark grey eyes creased with old laughter, with older despairs. Clasped tightly in his hands, a black leather wallet.

“You’re a stupid fuck,” Henry tells him, like Eames is seventeen years old again, and just failed his medical for the navy.

Eames looks at his brother, the same one who told him not to call anymore, who didn't even wait two days before setting the dogs on him  and who invited him to their mum’s funeral by encrypted email. Whose crumpled expression tells him everything he could possibly need to know.

“Jamie,” Henry says and Eames flinches.

“Just go,” he whispers, only once.

Henry goes, but not before leaving the wallet on the small table beside the bed.

Eames reaches for it, fumbles with his four broken fingers but manages to flip it open, peering through bruised eyes. The driver’s licence in the ID space is real. A photo of him from almost ten years ago.

The name is his own and so is the date of birth. There’s an address for a house in North London that’s probably mortgaged under his name, too.

Henry’s always been thorough, especially when it comes to fixing his little brother’s mistakes.

Eames is still staring at the shiny silver credit card, wondering what it’s maxed to, when a nurse comes in, all motherly charm and cooing through her teeth.

She pats his knee after checking his vitals and tells him he’s in Portsmouth Regional.

Eames doesn’t ask how long he’s been here for, or how he got here, or how long the twat with the pea coat and glasses had been sitting by his bedside before he woke up. He doesn’t ask if anyone else was admitted with him.

He doesn’t say anything at all.

.

.


	3. Third

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Umm, kids, what's going on? Am I seriously updating again? Miracles do happen.
> 
> Thanks a gazillion to AmStamGram, JDrew, MadGirlWithoutABox, FreightTrainInMyBrain, HaopySeaNinja, IAmANonnieMouse, icarusinflight, and dianmz for your enthusiasm and love. I hope you continue to enjoy....
> 
> Your grateful LRCx

_ Whatever I tell myself, the past feels uncomfortably close. _

_ ~ Michelle Paver _

.

.

Dom calls more regularly than either of them are comfortable with.

Usually it’s with a job related issue. Failing that, it’s another attempt to convince Eames a cushty retirement into the talons of academia isn’t the worst thing that could happen.

(See though, Eames, he's vindictive. He's hurting and he's cruel. So when Dom calls and says  _ there are worse things, _ Eames tells him he knows there are. That he knows what the worst thing is already, it was the look on Arthur’s face when he knew he was about to die a painful, senseless death.)

Sometimes, though, Dom’s fresh out of excuses and calls anyway. 

Those are the worst.

The chasm of their terrible loss gapes beneath Eames’ feet like the yawn of a glacial crevasse.

Like now, while Eames sits at a train station watching the comings and goings of the holiday makers, their stuttering suitcases, gleeful children; their loud anxieties about the confusing local transport system.

He answers the call, not because he particularly wants to, but because he’s learned his lesson about not answering his phone.

“You know, I miss the days when you’d trek across the continent to come find me,” he drawls.

_ “Your reticent attitude towards telecommunication did make life difficult for the rest of us,”  _ Dom says with a laugh.

Thankfully, he doesn’t point out that Eames’ previous allergy to mobiles didn’t matter to Dom, not when he had a Point Man who was better known among the criminal classes as The Bloodhound.

“And yet I was never wanting for work,” Eames says with hasty certainty. “It’s ever so nice to be wanted. Speaking of which, what can I do for you?”

There’s a pause, which is when he realises it’s one of  _ those  _ calls. 

Up ahead, a woman argues fiercely with her youngest child about the necessity of a hot chocolate at two in the afternoon. The child wails, big fat tears rolling down his puffy cheeks, doesn’t seem to realise his mum is on the verge of tears, too.

_ “I just wondered if you’d be anywhere within a few hundred miles of France soon. I’m taking the kids for the summer. Seeing Paris, travel South. You know.” _

The last two words seem to imply that Eames has known and enjoyed any kind of family holiday in the past two decades, which is preposterous. 

The sentiment rings clear all the same.

“I’m on a job right now,” he says obtusely.

Dom’s frustration crackles through the line.

_ “Well, if you’re-” _

“Who put you up to this?” Eames snaps, and his hackles rise further still at Dom’s bewildered chuckle.

_ “Nobody,”  _ Dom insists.  _ “I just thought-” _

“Has my brother called you?” Eames asks.

He’s utterly incensed by now. The anger has spilled so quickly through him, it’s thinning his blood and clogging the stressed barriers of his arteries.

Across the platform, a tall slender man in a charcoal suit stares at him with morose disappointment.

Eames’ breath cuts his oesophagus and his skin itches. The shrill automated voice of the platform announcements is loud.

Over the tracks, standing amidst the crowds, the sleek shape of Arthur stands, watching him. Those dark, accusatory eyes.

A train is approaching and the familiar weighty urge to jump in front of it flashes through the soles of his feet, tickling his shins.

_ “I haven’t spoken to anyone, Eames,”  _ Dom scoffs and he sounds put out.

On the opposite platform, Arthur waves. He takes a step tantalisingly towards the edge of the platform.

“I’m absolutely fine,” Eames snarls and Dom’s responding scoff of utter disbelief is searing.

From across the tracks, Arthur shouts,  _ “You’re being paranoid!” _

Then Dom sighs deeply and murmurs,

_ “Eames, you’re being paranoid.” _

Panic flashes through him, bright as starlight.

Eames ends the call, frantic. There’s a train coming, he can hear the tannoy announcement and see Arthur’s lurching readiness to leap. 

Eames grabs the keychain inside his coat pocket. The dogtag is still attached and when he pulls it out it’s all there, just like his godfather left it. The wonky  _ W  _ and the blood type indented instead of embossed.

Fear throttles him and Arthur smiles at him with resilient ferocity and in his hand Eames can feel his phone buzzing. Dom’s number flashes on the screen.

Eames holds his breath as the crowds close in.

There’s a bell ringing and Arthur bellows across the platform, waves his hands in the air, as shrill as Eames’ exploding thoughts he screams, 

_ “Close your eyes!” _

.

.

Eames feels the skin of both knees split open when he hits the ground, his head spinning like a top in his hands and the wet heat of kisses ghosting the back of his neck.

.

.

Maybe this could have all been very different.

Or maybe it was inevitable.

.

.

Maybe he should have known it would come to this, coughing bloody ash and forgetting what his totem is supposed to read.

Maybe he's like those old PASIV models, the ones that burned out in two levels, left their dreamers trapped inside them as the reapers struck.

Maybe he's not built to last.

.

.

They bought a house in New England for the irony, but there’s nothing ironic about it once they move in.

The bedroom is an awful mauve shade, the kitchen is lavender and the bathroom tiles are dirty creme.

Eames repaints it all over the course of two weeks, while he’s laid up after an episode of somnacin poisoning following a terrible choice in business partners. 

He hears the rumours of the errant chemist’s untimely demise while Arthur is away on a job in Brazil.

“Fennick is dead, apparently,” he says when Arthur gets back.

More accurately, when they are lying side by side on the living room floor, naked and carpet burned, several hours after Arthur gets back.

“Apparently,” Arthur concurs breathlessly. 

The bruise Eames sucked into the back of his shoulder is livid and large. Eames slides his hand wetly down Arthur’s slippery back, into the crease of his arse.

Quivering, Arthur tilts back into the touch, his hips arching upwards with his head bowed to bare the nape of his neck.

Eames tucks closer into Arthur, snaking possessive arms around him. Arthur protests weakly, wriggling in his grip.

“My hero,” Eames whispers teasingly.

“Fuck off,” Arthur grumbles, the smile in his voice secreted away out of sight as Eames nudges his way around to kiss his frown.

“The carpet’s going to stain,” he warns, because he has by now discovered to his utter delight that Arthur is every bit the clean freak his overly ironed shirts suggests him to be.

Surprisingly, Arthur’s only response is to laugh.

Then he shuffles around in Eames’ arms until his nose is squashed into his cheek. His breath is hot, sweat sour. Their skin sticks together, scrapes with salt and Arthur’s eyes are very dark, purple bags under them that don't mask the smile hidden there.

“You’re being very affectionate,” Eames says suspiciously.

The last time Arthur stayed horizontal for so long after sex was when he had a dislocated kneecap, and even then he’d kicked Eames out quickly to fetch a washcloth.

Arthur’s eyes glitter like wet honey.

“You’ve been very sick,” he replies.

Eames grins.

“Oh, so this was a pity shag?” he asks and Arthur makes a loud humming sound, nodding.

Eames stares at the last few licks of fire in the grate. The coal is almost burnt out, the glow dark orange, dancing in ripples of flames. The lamplight from behind him is stronger, and it’s a hard white light that casts the strongest beams over them.

“Exactly,” Arthur affirms. “You’ve been in such a sorry state ever since that asshole nearly killed you. It was getting on my nerves.”

He’s sticky and boneless where he lies, eyelids hooded and limbs slack.

Eames covers his mouth with his own. Creeps a hand up to his jaw to sneak his thumb over his bottom lip, into his mouth, into the kiss. 

His heart flutters weakly in his chest.

His teeth dig deep into Arthur’s tongue. He can taste salt and copper and he can hear the crackle of the fire, the hum of electricity. 

With hard hands he pins Arthur to the floor, presses him bodily into the carpet and coaxes every part of him into willing submission as they forget the fire and the cold and the stains. Forget everything but this.

.

.

He burns it all down on a Wednesday. 

There are stains in the carpet of the living room that he didn’t even try to wash out.

Ruddy black ones, that were once red. 

Arthur’s. The stains of his heart and his tears and the dents of his ghost where it paces these halls unwanted.

_ Close your eyes,  _ he had whispered but Eames didn't, he couldn't, not for one second could he stop looking.

.

.

He goes back, over and over, to the smallest pieces, the ones that fit with uneasy grace.

.

.

“You owe me big time,” Eames spits as he throws his hastily removed shirt onto the floor.

Arthur eyes it distractedly from where he sits on the sofa.

They’ve rented a suite with a balcony that overlooks the stretching south of Lucca, which doesn’t even rank in Eames’ top five cities in Tuscany. He feels expertly cheated.

Arthur’s watching him pace like a caged tiger with his most serene expression, the one that some people mistake for a death glare.

“Dinner and a blowjob?” he offers, one eyebrow quirked upwards.

Eames bares his gnashing teeth.

“Oh ho,  _ no _ darling. I mean  _ big time.  _ I’m talking a holiday. A real one. On the equator, near the ocean, with at least three nights of gambling during which, win or lose, you shall congratulate me on my poker face and compliment my stellar choices without question.”

“He’s not that bad,” Arthur drawls, which is absolutely the biggest lie Eames has ever heard.

“He’s a terror of epic proportions and you know it. Jesus, Arthur, the job isn’t even that interesting.”

Arthur raises both of his eyebrows and, well, yes. That’s a pretty big lie, too.

“I seem to recall five years ago you lamenting the lack of jobs that rely exclusively on planned improvisation,” Arthur points out coolly, as if it’s completely normal to remember things Eames said half a decade ago, probably after several whisky sours.

He’s sitting with his arms stretched along the back of the sofa on either side of him, looking for all the world like time is his plaything and maybe so is Eames. 

If he didn’t have a large stack of files in his lap that is probably worth more than Eames’ life to get muddled up, Eames would straddle his thighs and pin him there for at least an hour, just to ride the tension out of himself.

As it is, he’s fairly certain that’s a one way ticket to getting reacquainted with the loneliness of his left hand for at least a week, so he refrains with some effort.

“You said Ariadne would be on this one,” he mopes irritably. “At least she has a sense of humour.”

“She has exams,” Arthur says for the umpteenth time.

“She doesn’t even need a degree anymore!” 

“Some of us still have family to please, Eames,” Arthur reminds him callously.

Eames stops pacing to stare accusingly at him, hurt flashing through his chest.

It’s silly, really, because Arthur doesn’t have a family to please, either. Actually, he has even less than Eames. 

He stares up from his sofa, impassive and judging as harshly as he always does when it comes to Eames’ self-involvement, of which he has plenty.

Shame quietly crawls over Eames as his irritation gives way to fond frustration. He looks at Arthur, at his slick hair and loose tie and wondering face.

_ Who brought the twink?  _ Eames asked the first time, the first job, and when he remembers it now it makes him smile deeply.

Arthur narrows his eyes with suspicion

“What?” he asks dryly.

Eames crosses his arms over his chest and shakes his head slowly.

“I just love you,” he says, so flighty it’s almost dismissive. An afterthought of attention.

Arthur’s cross expression cracks a little, fondness breaking through that isn’t quite a smile. It softens everything about him nonetheless.

“I love you, too,” he replies.

It isn’t the first time, won’t even be the last.

It might, however, be the most truthful.

Eames crosses the room in a few strides, pausing just long enough to mould his hand to Arthur’s jaw, tilt him up and kiss him with brisk confident love, a dry smack of lips that Arthur leans into even as Eames pulls away.

“I’m going to shower,” he announces. “Then I’m going to run surveillance on Anita Collins for a few more hours. Then I’m going to come back here and you’re going to fuck me. Sound good?”

“Sounds good,” Arthur replies with half a smile. “We can try the bathtub again, if you want.”

Eames pushes the side of Arthur’s head away, just to crumple his fingers through his hair, ruffling it.

“Not on your life - or mine, ta.”

Arthur’s laugh follows him out of the room.

.

.

At the end, the very last of it, there is this.

.

.

A moment of suspended terror. Arthur’s fierce scream as blood tears out of him in a word that would have been Eames’ name, if not for the knife that cuts it in half through his throat.

It scrapes through the room as Eames, silent, watches with the muted horror of the disbelieving.

Arthur is loud, he is ferocious, he is alive, and then he is not.

His blood stains the floor and his blank, glassy eyes stare through Eames with the kind of festering despair that can only be found in the faces of the dead.

Eames remembers it like a painting, crimson and violet and peach. A splash of oil colours that refuse to dry on the canvas, untouchable and smudged.

He hears the muffled words of a dispute, feels the hot cutting slice of a knife driving fast into his chest, again into his side. 

A long knife, razored. Already stained with Arthur’s blood. The last atoms of Arthur that were once stardust, buried inside him next to his heart.

It’s the last thing he recalls before the memory putters out, like a candle flame snuffed to smoke.

.

.

He goes back, again and again, but it’s stuck together like PVA paradoxes, incomprehensible and sodden with regret.

.

.

The doorbell rings downstairs.

“Are you going to get that?” Arthur murmurs between kisses and Eames shakes his head side to side, his tongue sliding wet streaks up his cheeks.

Arthur extracts himself with great difficulty, Eames’ grasping fingers snatching in his hair as he licks up his throat with exaggerated enthusiasm, making him wince away, ticklish.

“It’ll just be Lesley,” Eames grumbles.

“All the more reason to answer fast,” Arthur chuckles, neatening his shirt and rebuckling his belt.

Their closest neighbour, who even so lives a good half mile out of range, has adopted a particular habit of dropping off all her excess vegetables from her garden, ever since Eames made the rookie mistake of telling her their jobs kept them too busy to grow their own.

Eames is mildly irked by the woman’s assumption this makes them somehow utterly helpless.

Arthur, on the other hand, finds her incredibly sweet. As such, her visits inevitably turn into at least an hour of coffee and chatter.

Eames knows he shouldn’t begrudge Arthur his peculiar taste in friends. The domesticity that has stuck to them in New Hampshire is spreading outwards in every direction of their lives, and they have spent more time  _ in  _ that  _ out  _ for the past six months.

This is not their only property, but it is their only home. 

So what if they have a nosy neighbour who thinks they’re called Charlie Morte and Blake Holden? 

They have a house with colours they chose, a kitchen with a fully stocked spice rack and a bed they picked together after a spectacular argument about pillow plumpness that sometimes Eames still brings up, just to see Arthur twitch with annoyance.

As Arthur disappears out of the bedroom and downstairs, Eames spreads starfish over the bed, grinning up at the ceiling.

He can smell sweat and cinnamon and the vanilla blossom of that stupid soap Arthur bought just to piss him off. He sighs, reluctant to go downstairs when he’s still half hard in his jeans and his shirt’s mostly undone, too lazy to fix either issue.

The doorbell rings again and Eames chuckles at their neighbour’s impatience.

He hears Arthur call out something about waiting, the click of the front door opening.

There’s a pause that in hindsight will seem like a minute, but really is barely a second.

Then a gun goes off, and Eames’ world falls mercilessly  out from beneath him.

.

.


	4. Fourth

_The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent._

_~ Stanley Kubrick_

.

.

There’s a grave, of course.

Henry’s doing, interfering prick that he is.

It reads:

_Blake Arthur Holden_

_16 July 1981 - 12 July 2015_

_We dream - it is good we are dreaming._

He thinks maybe Henry was trying to be funny, because his jokes have always been cruel. Even when Eames was a child, his big brother did not pull the punches of his jibes.

And Eames, he has to be grateful, because the only other option is to have nothing.

He doesn’t make it to the funeral because there isn’t one, not really.

Banished from the hospital, Henry had made the necessary arrangements then had a courier bring Eames a file with the plot number and a list of assets he was welcome to use to get back on his feet. There was a phone, too, with five numbers programmed into it.

He finally visits it in December. Sees the white marble and the indigo engraving and the sheer spread of snow.

He digs through that icy quilt with bare hands, plunges his fingers into the freeze and scrapes away until the grave is revealed, with it a bed of broken snowdrops that have been planted at the base.

Lesley, he assumes, their nosy, chattering neighbour and yes, there’s a tiny little folded card amidst the flowers. Smudged blue biro, soaked, barely legible.

_Charlie, if you find this, know that you are loved. L xo_

Which is all very well, only _Charlie_ isn’t real.

Eames kneels in the snow, instantly soaking his trousers right through, all the way to his bone marrow. He breathes loud, shuddering breaths and places his hands on the icy marble, directly over the lies of a name so that it reads only _Arthur._

He stays longer than he should. The light drops fast and he disappears into the night like fog, as if he might fall apart into the snowdrift, dig down into the frozen soil and sleep in the bed of the earth.

.

.

(Love shared is multiplied, and that's all very well, but so is grief, he’s sure of it, doesn’t care what they say. What Eames isn’t as sure of is if it’s worth it, any of it, because what could possibly be worth this?)

.

.

The bar is packed, lemon light and beer mats.

The whisky selection is paltry, too much bourbon and not enough scotch. There’s a million types of gin, most of which are probably seventy percent sugar.

“Glenfiddich, neat, thanks,” Eames says to the bartender with a challenge in his face.

The boy in question, probably twenty at most, looks mildly horrified.

“It’s a scotch,” Eames adds to the crowded silence the boy offers.

“I, um, we don’t -” the bartender starts, glancing desperately at his colleague as she pours a Guinness wearing a dazzlingly false smile and too much bronzer.

“It’s a very common whisky,” Eames continues impatiently. “Go check your stock, hmm?”

Cowed, the boy scurries away, scarlet faced.

“They don’t have any,” a woman beside him says.

Eames smirks at her.

“I know,” he replies.

The woman laughs. Her blonde ringlets flutter around her rosy face as she turns.

“You are wicked,” Alice Hamley says.

Alice likes _wicked_ men.

Eames knows, because he’s been following her every move for weeks now.

“And you are a vision,” Eames tells her, making a point of taking in her tightly wrapped navy dress, diamonds in her earlobes and around her wrist. “What’ll you have?”

Alice Hamley purses her lips, just as the bartender returns, out of breath and skittishly shy. He opens his mouth to apologise and Alice interrupts with ice in her voice.

“Nevermind, we’ll take two glasses of cabernet pinot blend. Go on.”

They boy hurries away in the opposite direction towards the wines, ears burning.

“I take it they don’t stock cabernet pinot, either,” Eames says with a sly grin.

Alice Hamley steps closer, so she is almost pressed along his body, shoulder to knee.

“Not in the two years I’ve been coming here,” she says.

She smells of lilacs and sweet soap. There’s a very faint smudge in her eyeliner at the corner of one eye.

“I’m Alice,” she offers.

“Sam,” Eames supplies, kissing her knuckles with too much flair. She rolls her eyes.

“What’ll it be, Sammy?” she asks.

“Now, now,” Eames responds coolly. “I’m not that sort of boy - two mimosas, two double tanqueray tonics and two gold tequilas, there’s a good lad,” he throws at the bartender as the kid returns, looking flustering and upset.

“My, my,” Alice teases with a nod to the bartender as he leaves for a third time.

One of his colleagues, the plastered smile girl, shoots Eames a loathsome look of disapproval.

“Feeling confident, I see.”

Eames snakes a hand around Alice’s waist, light enough to be thrown off, strong enough to pull her closer to his chest.

“I have good instincts,” he says, which is almost completely true.

His eyes cross the room in a sweeping glance.

Sitting at the closest window table, a familiar suit, that slender outline silhouetted by the shadows of the bar. Eames smiles down at the woman tucked close into his waist.

At the window, the figure stands, and his eyes are hidden.

Behind him, a shadowless light.

.

.

It starts easy, a dream.

Just a dream, nothing more.

(He never stopped, they never faltered. He is too full of dreams to lose them to a mere machine.)

Eames chews some xanax and washes it down with pineapple juice. He’s fully stocked and expertly taunted, because Henry’s a manipulative shithead.

He lies down on the plush black sofa and he dreams.

.

.

The kitchen, with its spice rack and eight ring range and the built in wine rack that Eames is sure he could get drunk just looking at.

Arthur standing at the counter, half dressed. The lithe contours of his back flex and bow as he cuts into a pile of sweet potatoes they’ll never finish between them.

(Nobody could possibly eat something with a name like _yams,_ you bloody yank.)

“Arthur,” Eames chokes, seized by an overwhelming, tidal surprise.

He turns, that soft dimpled face, smiles broadly.

“You’re early,” he says.

Eames has always loved that smile. Arthur, he lies with his words and even sometimes with his actions, but that smile, it’s the most truthful thing about him.

The surprise vanishes, wiped away as easily as that smile.

Arthur drops the knife and the potato. Crosses the room, all skin and sweats, and kisses Eames hard enough for his teeth to nick his skin.

Eames responds with the same groping enthusiasm as always, fingertips in the shallow trench of his spine and his arms trapping him close.

“You should have called,” Arthur says as he leans back.

He’s tanned and his hair’s curled over his forehead and he looks so young, as young as Eames ever saw him.

“I -” he says, but he’s interrupted by the doorbell. That chime, piercing like a bird’s beak.

Eames loosens his grip in a half turn but Arthur clutches him, stiff and sudden.

There's a chill he didn't notice before, didn't notice because it wasn't there.

“Don’t,” Arthur says, a little frantic, a crease between his eyebrows that wasn’t there before either.

A reddish bruise on the corner of his mouth.

“Arthur,” Eames says, stroking a thumb over his swollen lip. It comes away red.

Arthur, he’s frightened. He’s shaking so violently.

“Don’t,” he says again. “I’m not ready.”

“What do you mean?” Eames asks.

How absurd, how foolish. Nothing has ever sounded more incorrect, more impossible. This is Arthur, who remembers the account numbers of marks he hit years ago and what Eames had for breakfast year on year. Arthur, he’s the definition of _born ready._

Not this time, though. Arthur shakes his head, he’s so young, so afraid. Eames tightens the circle of his arms, cups the back of the younger man’s head.

The doorbell, louder. A knock of skin on wood, cracked.

“Don’t,” Arthur cries out and clutches him and Eames squeezes him tight, desperate to stop his godawful trembling.

That doorbell, loud, and the smash of glass.

Eames feels Arthur’s hot tears soaking his neck. His heart is pounding. Arthur, he shatters. His knees give out and his weight, it’s too much, Eames almost drops him but that hot flow of, no, not tears.

Blood.

Bloods drops and splashes between them, soaking Eames’ clothes, spreading between them, a spilled tin of paint.

“Arthur,” he chokes, over and over as Arthur’s face drops to his chest and that blood seeps out of him, ragdoll bones. Eames can smell the copper tang in his skin, that never washes away.

“Arthur,” Eames says, over and over and over.

The doorbell, it rings.

.

.

He wakes up, parched and soaked.

.

.

Then, one day, it isn't just a dream anymore.

.

.

The chemist, she hums as she works. She speaks so soft, a simper in Eames’ ear.

He twitches uncomfortably as he draws the Senior Accounts Manager again and over her shoulder he can see Arthur, see him sweating, feel him judging.

He always looked at Eames with disappointment, didn’t he? Always found him so lacking.

“Are you listening to me?” Annabel asks, insulted and blithe.

“Of course not,” Eames says irritably, and Arthur smirks at that.

.

.

(Was he really disappointed?)

.

.

Eames thinks, maybe, if he hadn’t loved Arthur, he’d have hated him.

.

.

“What are you doing?” he asks, with all the disdain he can muster.

It’s hard, when all he wants to do is grin down at the erratic, fumbling Point Man as he fusses with building plans.

Arthur glares up at him, thunderous as the clouds outside.

“Aren’t you supposed to be tailing Simkins?”

There’s a hint of a snarl to it, but his eyes are bruised with exhaustion and his posture is as close to _slumped_ as Eames as ever seen it. Vulnerable, surprisingly, doesn’t suit him, despite the soft youth that still clings steadfast to his cheeks.

“I finished hours ago,” Eames replies coolly.

Visibly startled, Arthur looks up from the floor at the clock. His eyebrows lift in a crease of surprise and Eames is struck with the sudden urge to smooth it over with his thumb.

He’s also fairly certain that’s the fastest way to earn a bullet in his knee, so curbs the instinct by crossing his arms over his chest. Belatedly, he realises this is probably also the wrong thing to do, because now Arthur thinks he’s _posturing._

(He is, of course he is, he’s a Forger, it’s what he does.)

With a defensive scowl, Arthur starts tidying the piles of prints and moving them to the big round table half taken up by a badly put away chemistry set.

“Would it _kill_ you?” he mutters to himself as he pushes a briefcase of vials aside to make room for more folders. His movements are fidget quick and dismissive. His back is turned and Eames watches him, curious and soft.

When he finally runs out of excuses, Arthur turns back to face him.

“You’re an only child, aren’t you?” Eames asks, mostly without meaning to.

He'll learn, one day, how to shut his fucking trap.

Arthur twitches. His shoulders stiffen and his mouth moves around new vowels and it looks, very briefly, like he might cry, or perhaps that’s the exhaustion.

Then he frowns his frowniest of frowns and Eames laughs.

“You have a very only-child fear of failure,” he explains, leaning his weight more into one leg and cocking his head in thought.

Arthur, hunched and barbed, with his mouth clamped shut in defiance.

Eames almost feels sorry for him, the way he always feels sorry for only children. That eversome lack of sociability, that seed sprout of self-ness that comes from being moulded as one of one, and not one of some.

He thinks, maybe, Arthur is not simply an only child, but one of those saddest of only children, who still, somehow, had to compete for his parents’ attention.

Eames was the almost-baby of his family. There was only one more after him, but three came before. Three who had already soaked up a lot of sunshine love from his parents, so that by the time Eames came along, he was an afterthought, raised as much by Henry as either of his parents.

(And the last one, Alice, the rosy girl among the thorns of four boys, she was adored, the way a painting is adored. With fervour and distance and possessive transcendence.)

Arthur stares defiantly back at him, now, with his only-child stubbornness and his horrible vulnerability.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Eames says, shrugging, maybe enjoying the teasing a little too much. Arthur's flushed and annoyed and ever so cross. “It’s really-”

“I have a sister,” Arthur announces, quite abruptly, and much louder than Eames.

It sounds stilted, sounds practiced, sounds like half a lie spoken into a mirror until it's true.

Eames stops, eyebrows raised high and mouth open mid-taunt.

There's a particular quirk to Arthur's mouth, the set of his jaw that begs a necessary kind of belief.

Eames narrows his eyes in shrewd deduction, then smirks.

“Not anymore you don’t.”

Arthur looks like a slap would have been more welcome.

His mouth is open, a perfect inviting circle, and he blinks very fast. His arms jerk up and down, twice, then he folds them over his chest, as if to trap the hurt inside.

Eames feels something in his throat, a tickling that might be guilt, if guilt came naturally to a man like Eames.

(Only it doesn't, of course it doesn't, he's a Forger, he's not built for it.)

“I didn’t-” he says, although he’s not sure how to end that, because _mean it_ would be a lie. It’s perfectly obvious Arthur doesn’t have a sister anymore, even if perhaps he did, once.

(Of course Eames knows, of course he’s noticed, he’s a Forger, it’s what he does.)

Arthur shakes his head, wet dog hard, and turns back to the table after staring at the door behind Eames, having clearly decided trying to budge past isn’t the worth the effort.

Eames sighs, a quiet little huff of irritation.

When he approaches, Arthur’s shoulders rise considerably. His ears are scarlet and so is the back of his neck.

Eames stops directly behind him, close enough to hear his very thoughts.

He wonders, not for the first time, where Cobb picked this little orphan prodigy. Whether his name was already Arthur by then, or if Cobb gave him that, too.

He’d like to know. He’d like to ask before the question burns a hole right through his tongue, but he doesn’t. Even through his neatly fitted shirt, Eames can see Arthur’s back is knotted tight with anxiety.

So instead of speaking, or even reaching a hand out to place heavily on his shoulder, Eames just stands very close, very quiet, and waits.

The clock is loud as it races past the smallest hours. The windows, cold and dark, and the lamp in the corner casts long, stretching fingers over them both.

With his head curled downwards and his hands tight over his elbows, Arthur murmurs,

“You’ve never lost someone you didn’t throw away first.”

He can’t possibly know that.

It feels like a bold accusation to make without a lot of research, research that Arthur is more than capable of handling, come to think of it, so perhaps he _does_ know that.

Eames swallows dryly, makes a coughing sound that tastes of shame and he takes a hasty step back when Arthur turns. There’s a wry, mirthless smile painted on his lips.

He mirrors the tilt of Eames’ head, a slight and menacing tic.

It flares like a wasp sting in Eames’ gut and when he lashes out, it’s small and fierce.

“Martyring yourself for someone else’s heart isn’t noble, you know.”

He honestly has no idea what they’re arguing about by now.

Still, Eames resolutely grits his teeth, pressing his tongue up against the roof of his mouth.

Arthur’s tired and irritable and he has a mouth made for bruises. He stares at Eames with such profound and hurtful knowledge, it makes Eames want to punch him, just so he can kiss it better.

(This is not the first time he has thought this, but it will be over a year before he acts upon the impulse. Well, half of it.)

Arthur’s smile deepens, darkens. He laughs an uncomfortable laugh and he asks,

“You don’t know what loneliness feels like, do you?”

And Eames, who is so many people at once, who couldn’t possibly know loneliness when he’s never been alone, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t recognise it.

He takes another step back, like the coward he is.

“Go to sleep, Arthur,” he says, and he turns away feeling strangely wretched.

Sometimes, it hurts to look at Arthur, the same way it hurt to look at Alice when she was a baby, gold curled and delighted by everything.

Arthur is neither gold curled nor delighted by anything. Nor is he Eames’ little sister, of course.

He’s tall and he’s angry and his tie is still perfect even at two in the morning. He’s prickly all over and he’s terribly attractive and yet again, Eames wants nothing more than to know where Cobb found him.

When Arthur doesn’t reply, Eames leaves him to it, full of ants and wrath and it’s only when he reaches his hotel room he realises, that’s exactly what Arthur meant.

 _You don’t know what loneliness feels like, do you?_ He asked, and Eames, he fell into it, fell deep into the well of that accusation and now he’s drenched in its truth.

He doesn’t know what loneliness feels like at all, but there’s been a thorn in his spine for so long, he’s grown used to it, and he thinks maybe, that’s loneliness, right there.

.

.

That thorn, it comes back.

It’s there beneath his heart, scratching a tally into the raw muscle while Eames, he kneels in the snow with his hands iced to the marble, and that name stares back at him, unmalleable and cold.

.

.

Behind him, those footprints, that follow his grief like a swarm.

.

.


	5. Fifth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I say something rude about people from Essex that isn't true here, and there are implications of sexual abuse of a minor that are not at all explicit, but should nonetheless be taken seriously.
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me!
> 
> LRCx

_He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller._

_~ Anne Tyler_

.

.

Dom doesn’t know, that much is clear.

There are a lot of soft hidden glances and tentative questions, but it’s a meaningless hum of platitudes and Eames, he sits passively at their table, engaged in a staring contest with Arthur, who is obviously cheating, because the dead don’t blink.

Dom, however, does not cease his waffling. For seven minutes Eames stares across the table, rolling an elastic band around his fingers, while Arthur stares back, a blank mask of timelessness.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Eames asks, interrupting Dom mid-flow.

Dom pauses, a fleeting curl of concern in his  expression. His eyes flit downwards and Eames is thrilled to realise he’s wondering how much he’s drunk of his beer already.

“Not, _ghosts,”_ he mumbles, tries to embed some kind of sensibility into that dreadful word. “But - remember before, with the old PASIVs? There was that rumour always circling. I know  someone who worked with someone whose old partner got trapped inside his own PASIV.”

Dom’s expression, an exact mirror of Arthur’s and he doesn’t even know it.

He’s got more worry lines now, which are probably thanks to his children, or maybe they’re not. He sips his beer and stares at Eames with the face of a father.

“About as religious as dreamshare ever got,” he says slowly, figuring Eames out like a paradox.

Eames fiddles uncomfortably with his collar, the fever flush of his skin.

“I don’t mean -”

“I know what you mean,” Dom says, and of course he does. He has so many reasons to know what Eames is talking about.

Across the table, Arthur, a shadow of purple and twilight. There’s blood pooling in his eyes, those crimson tears carving valleys in his lids.

 _Close your eyes,_ he whispered, as his breath caught in his mouth.

Dom’s hand on his arm, grounding, tight, real.

There’s no blood in his eyes. They are blue and clear.

“Eames,” he says, says it like a friend, like a father.

(Only Eames, he hated his father, hated him so badly, and he doesn't want a friend, doesn't want to need one.)

“He’s in my head,” he says, ice and salt and skies torn apart. “All of the time.”

And Dom, who lost everything, who wears his grief like a cloak trailed with mud.

His hand on Eames’ forearm so tight.

“It’s not real,” he says, like it’s that simple, like it’s as easy as knowing that pain, it’s just in the mind.

And Eames, he can take pain, he can take everything else but Arthur’s voice around those vowels, it won’t leave.

 _Close your eyes,_ like seeing is believing, like Eames could forget that hollow scream as they bore down upon his lover like a wolf pack in December.

“What if he’s real?” Eames asks, and his eyes, they don’t leave that bloodied, unholy face.

Dom’s response, caustic, a caterwaul. He doesn't understand.

Eames’ arm bleeds and his heart yearns and Arthur, he says,

_“Please, don’t.”_

.

.

When the gun goes off, Eames leaps upwards, a burst of flames in a grate.

Adrenaline like battery acid on his tongue. A pistol in his hand, and a knife. He’s on the landing with his heart left trembling in the bedroom.

Quick breaths, in, in. The clatter of voices and feet and Arthur, silence.

Dead?

No, not dead. Eames sees him through the slats in the banister, on his knees gritting his teeth in the hallway.

A hand in his hair that is not Eames’, dragging him back with a colossal strength that is not Eames’.

“Come on, sweetheart,” with a voice that is not Eames’.

Three bullets in the ceiling, the bang! A ricochet in Eames’ chest.

Arthur, hunched and squirming in a stranger’s grip. Leg shot? Gut?

Eames’ palms sweating around the gun and then that voice, such wanton enthusiasm, drifting from the hall below.

_“I know you’re up there.”_

A gun pressing into the top of Arthur’s head, which Eames has kissed ten thousand times.

“Alright,” he says.

“Calm down,” he says.

“Let him go,” he says.

Then the blinding hit to his nape.

He goes down hard, and the gun falls out of his hand.

.

.

When he wakes up, Arthur is there, and he is crying cold, silent tears.

.

.

 _Ariadne called about a job,_ he said.

That reluctance, that trepidation.

 _When do you leave?_ He asked.

_I don't. I said no._

.

.

And it’s so madly irrational, Eames feels like he could die from it.

It’s so stupid, to think that taking a job might have saved him.

.

.

He stays in that house in London, the one mortgaged under his name without permission. Stocked with sleeping pills and fruit juice and plush new furniture.

Eames wants to not need it, but it’s so safe here, in his big brother’s territory. He’s untouchable here, and he’s unfindable, too.

 _(You’ll come back, boy,_ his father said, the first time he left.)

London swallows up people like a desert of concrete rain.

It spat Eames out in pieces when he was twenty-two and maybe now that he’s only shards, it’ll take him back.

Every movement is accompanied by sharp, sudden tugs in his chest. Three stab wounds, apparently, though he only remembers two of them.

A mostly broken hand that’ll never fully recover and a knee that will bite hard for the rest of his life.

He’s agitated and he’s aching and there’s restless lethargy in his footsteps as he paces the kitchen, out of breath by turn four.

He wonders with apathy if there are cameras, hidden somewhere in the crevices of this old stone sanctuary of confinement.

Outside, a downpour. England, true to form.

.

.

 _I have something to tell you,_ he whispered into the velvet of the aftermath. Midnight sunshine, and the kiss of Pasadena in summer.

.

.

_(There is something you need to know.)_

.

.

After sixteen days of listlessness and pineapple juice, Eames wakes up at the sound of a key being inserted into a lock. The pin crack loud as it trills open.

Eames, a half moon curve on the sofa, his spine stitched with fear that thunders through him.

 _I know you're up there,_ ringing in his ears and the door is opening, so quietly deafening, he can't breathe it's so quick.

Someone is inside, someone is inside and he's too groggy to do more than panic.

His hands scramble for purchase to push himself up. Pain jars through the barely healed tears in his chest but he needs to get up, get up now because someone is inside.

 _Arthur,_ he thinks blindly, and he gasps out in another seize of pain.

In his haste, he slips off the sofa. Crashes hard and cries out, inwards, like a knife in his chest.

(He knows what that feels like, now.)

Someone is inside. He can't breathe and he can't move and _someone is inside, someone is -_

“Jim?”

The word catches in his heart, that mouse brown voice, that sharp little girl, like a painting on the wall.

Eames can feel himself shaking as a shock of white blonde hair comes into view. Fingers scrape over his shoulder and he flinches back.

“Sorry, fuck, sorry,” Alice says.

Eames’ breath rattles inside him as his little sister's face emerges from the shapeless void, her dark blue eyes and tightly wound grimace.

“Jamie?” she says, which is worse, she never calls him that. It was always _Jim_ or _Jimmy_ or even _Jimbo_ when she was feeling snippy.

Eames heaves himself up, breathing hard through his nose and shaking his head when she offers to help with an impatient waggle of fingers.

“M’alright,” he manages to force out, wheezing.

He backs away into the sofa cushions, Alice kneeling in front of him, still wearing her soaked raincoat.

God, she's grown up. She's been grown up for a long time, but it's been so long since he's seen her.

At their mother's funeral, waterproof mascara and champagne flutes. She'd still seemed like a girl, then. Downy pillow sniffling and her voice crackling like burning bracken.

Now, she reaches her hand as obviously as she can towards Eames, until her palm moulds around his uninjured knee.

“I am so sorry,” she says, and it's unclear if she means for letting herself into his house without warning, or everything else that came before it.

She's always been terribly sincere, which is wildly terrifying when she's being nasty and discomfiting when she's being kind.

“S’alright,” he replies quietly, which isn't true, not at all, not by any account. His heart is stuttering and he feels exhausted already.

He must show it on his face, because Alice backs away immediately.

“I'll get you some water,” that tone of rocket force.

She scurries away before he can protest.

She'd hate him for saying it, but sometimes, she really is a lot like mum.

Taking advantage of the solitude, Eames sinks into the sofa cushions again. Gathers his thoughts now that they've stopped blistering his skull.

If Alice felt it necessary to sneak in unannounced, that probably means Henry has banned her from visiting. Eames isn't sure why he bothers, to be honest.

Alice, golden and adored, hasn't listened to any of them since the day their father died, which had seen her flourish more gloriously than a phoenix from a dead grate. Untameable, a tigress in a house of porcelain dolls.

When she re-enters, carrying a tray with a jug of ice water, two glasses and a bag of crisps she must have conjured from thin air, he gets a better look at her. De-raincoated and wearing a bright purple dress she's at least ten years too old for by now.

“You've dyed your hair,” he says.

A flashy grin, still a teenager's grin, all teeth and tongue.

“Henners hates it. Told me I wasn't allowed to come to his next summer do if I'm going to come as an Essex trollop.”

Eames chuffs a noiseless, dusty laugh.

“Wanker,” he says, taking the glass of ice water she offers and sipping cautiously.

“I'm not here to drug you,” she says without irony.

She sits on the coffee table facing him, a safe distance between them that Eames pretends not to appreciate quite so much.

“What are you here for, then?”

A crease in her brow, worrisome, wary.

He's never had much love for her, and he knows it's a mutual disaffection. Nonetheless, they were forged in the same furnace, and that is more important than liking each other in a family such as theirs.

“Henners sent some lads down to Wick’s. He thinks whoever got your boy might have followed you here.”

“He's not a _boy,”_ Eames snarls before he can stop himself. It crashes over him again, remembering. He doesn't correct himself.

Alice quirks a solitary, judging eyebrow, which isn't her right, not at all, not when Arthur is older than her, not when he's achieved more than she could ever dream of, not when he's _dead-_

“Tell him to call off the manhunt.”

“Why?”

“Because I don't care.”

“Bullshit!”

Her outrage at his apathy is the closest she will probably come to admitting how much she actually does care. It rings far truer than her baseless apologies.

“I know who's responsible,” he says. The guilt pulls his gaze down to his knees, where he inspects the brace holding his left patella in place. “They aren't coming after me.”

Against all odds, against every fibre of her inherent nature, Alice doesn't ask.

Instead, she opens the share size bag of salt and vinegar, takes one, and holds the rest out for Eames to help himself.

He thinks maybe this is what he did for her, years ago, when she was eleven years old and getting shipped off to St Margaret’s. Her doe shy sadness and the ugly school skirts that itched even through tights.

“I'm sleeping with Henry's head of security,” is all she says, shrugging off his grunt of amusement with a look of casual disinterest. “Just so you know.”

Eames takes a handful of crisps; bites down on three at once. The salt nips the cut in the corner of his mouth and he licks it away, wincing.

“I'll keep it in mind,” he tells her, which is to say, not really, because however indifferent he is to her, he really doesn't want to know about that, however helpful her bed partners might be.

They finish the bag in amiable enough silence. Then she takes stock of all the high fat, high sugar necessities he's been denied by the enforced keeper of his welfare and promises to send him a Waitrose delivery.

It's a bait he doesn't rise to, only because he knows she'll pick the good chocolate.

.

.

She kisses his forehead when she leaves.

It's swift and unexpected. Makes his lungs shrink inside him, shrivel away from her unasked for tenderness.

.

.

They were forged in the same furnace, an unaffectionate fire.

He wonders who taught her how to care, even that much.

.

.

(It certainly wasn't him.)

.

.

The men who kill Arthur, they are nobodies.

Eames could track them down, probably, if he wanted.

He doesn't.

Eames is rarely a man of measure. He knows he'd relish exacting bloody vengeance on their rotten almost-corpses, would savour their screams that he'd drag slowly out of them in inches of skin and miles of nerve endings.

He knows something else, too.

He knows if he starts down that path, it will lead only to one end and he can't. He can't be that person, can't be the attack dog his father intended him to be.

Not for anyone, not even for himself.

Not even for Arthur.

.

.

“Crowley wants us to use the niece.”

The door slams behind Arthur on the last word of his announcement.

Eames blinks up at him from where he's lying on the bed, trying to somehow catch up on the two nights of sleep he's missed from trawling Lucca like a fool in a field of pyrite.

Arthur's flushed, hands on his hips in his most _I'm angry_ manner that Eames shouldn't find so arousing, not when it's so similar to every school teacher he ever had.

“What are you talking about?” he mumbles.

“Crowley!” Arthur says, far too loudly.

Eames winces, drawing back into his pillows and hiding from that rage, even though it isn't being directed at him.

Arthur, however, isn't in the mood for games. He stalks around the bed to plant himself firmly in Eames’ eyeline, crouches down until Eames can feel his face, tantalisingly close.

“Eames, he wants you to forge the niece.”

Eames opens a bleary eye.

“I happen to make for a charming thirteen year old girl,” he mutters. “It's fine. I'll do it, I don't care. Just let me sleep.”

“Eames, Eames listen to me.”

Arthur's hand is on his face, very warm, and a tremor passes through them.

“Eames,” he says again, and his mouth presses over Eames’ eyelid, his eyebrow, his jaw.

“Nuh,” Eames groans.

“Eames, please,” and it isn't the _please,_ it isn't the kiss to the corner of his mouth that does it.

It's the little choke around his name, ever so faint.

Eames opens his eyes and startled by the downturn of Arthur's mouth, not furious at all but frightened.

“Eames he wants to _use the niece.”_

Arthur's hand presses into his cheek and Eames reaches up to clasp it. He pushes up onto his elbow and takes in Arthur's expression, his disgust and his horror.

“Not like th-”

 _“Exactly_ like that,” Arthur spits.

Eames blinks. He moves his hand down Arthur's arm until it reaches his neck, where he thumbs along his Adam's apple.

He's seen thirteen year old Cami plenty, tailing her mother. She's precocious and surly and whittled to a sharp point.

He tries to imagine forging her, and it's easy enough. He feels sick, though, even without Arthur's eyes boring into him like that.

“We won't,” he says confidently. Says it like they have any control over Crowley, like he won't just find someone else if they don't comply.

Arthur knows he's bluffing. His expression doesn't change and he crawls up onto the bed to curl over Eames’ chest.

“Shoes on the bed,” Eames says, mostly teasing.

Arthur ignores him.

His hands pinched tight and his face in Eames’ throat and a shudder that slides through the non space between their bodies, that could have come from either of them.

“Hey,” Eames says, arms folding around the bundle trapping him into the mattress.

He's exhausted. Sleep trails through his veins sluggishly as he breathes deep and slow, forcing Arthur to match him breath for breath. He kisses the crown of Arthur's head, tastes pomade and shampoo.

“We'll fix it,” he says, although how, he has no idea. “Nothing will happen. We won't let it.”

Arthur makes a sound Eames has never heard before. A whining, aching sound that buries itself into Eames’ sternum and lodges into his bones.

He squeezes tight, and Arthur squeezes back.

.

.

“Sorry I made you take this job,” he says later.

Eames doesn't have it in him to say anything in reply.

Instead, he takes Arthur's hand, locks their fingers together for the long haul, and kisses his cheekbone with dry closed lips.

.

.

The first time it happens, of course, is in an airport.

Eames does well at first, all things considered.

There are bad dreams and jags of fear and the intangible comfort of fuzzy waking sleep before he remembers, every day, that there's no point sliding his hand across the cool plains of the mattress, because there's no-one there.

These are normal obstacles. They belong not only to Eames but to every single person who knows grief. It's not until he flies from London to Barcelona, gets to the airport and finds himself scanning the crowds of waiting faces intently, that the realisation of not only who, but _what_ he's lost becomes apparent.

And yes, perhaps he could convince himself that he's being a Forger, being a Thief, hell, being a People Watcher.

Only he isn't.

He's looking for that face, that unfindable face at every gate, every café.

Because sure, Arthur could track Eames down to a city from the other side of the world, but it's Eames who could find where in a city Arthur would go. He flies to Oslo, a connecting flight to Trondheim and as he passes through domestic transfer he scans the crowd, just like every time before. Hoping and fearing and needing and then, there he is.

In the open palm scoop of a fish restaurant, the first place Eames knows Arthur would gravitate to, there sits a familiar shape.

He's hunched over a book with a glass of white wine in his hand, hair glossed back and suit pristine.

Ferocious, gleeful dread grabs Eames with both hands and shakes him hard. He stops dead in his tracks and his hands feel weak holding his luggage and he stares at the man, at his half frown and his aura of belligerence.

Arthur looks up, catches Eames’ eye and grins. When he speaks, he's too far away to be heard.

Eames reads it, though.

Read it on his lips and in his smile, that singular truth, dazzling and very much there.

“You found me,” Arthur says, like this has all been some dreadful game, like he's had the time of his life while Eames has been going spare carrying the weight of his corpse like a chain around his neck.

Eames swallows dryly and bites his lip. He shudders a smile of his own, hopes it says everything he wants to say.

His eyes sting and water and he blinks the futile tears away, but in that briefest of moments, Arthur disappears.

Eames stares at the empty table, hollowed out and aged ten years in half as many seconds.

.

.

He tries to stop looking, he really does. It's just, he's _there,_ so very close, and Eames, he pretends for a living, he pretends better than anyone, but there are some things he can't pretend.

He's never pretended to be immune to temptation.

.

.


	6. Sixth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darlings,
> 
> Sorry it's been a little while.
> 
> Thank you so very much for your lovely comments! You are all angels. I hope you continue to enjoy this. I am always so happy to hear what you are thinking and feeling. 
> 
> Keep an eye on the tags, people.
> 
> You are all brilliant, it would be great to hear from you.
> 
> I hope everyone has had a splendid May. 
> 
> With dearest affection,  
> LRCx

_There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare._

_~ Mary Renault_

.

.

“I can help, you know,” she says. Annabel, not-Lee. “Whatever it is that you can see that the rest of us can't.”

Eames stares at her, the glossy rose of her lipstick and the cavern black inside her mouth.

The fox red of her distrustfulness.

She presses into the table, a child who won't eat their dinner.

She says, with all the sincerity that her eyes cannot summon:

“It's killing you.”

His heart baulks at that one, a quaver flat stutter of protestation.

She does not know what he has endured.

She looks like a little girl. Looks like Phillipa  _now_ and like Alice  _then._ She looks like Camilla Staroni with her ice lolly lips.

Eames could cradle half of her delicate face in one cupped palm. Could snap her bones so easy; easier than Arthur's snapped under ten hands.

Behind her, there is only a window, but Eames can feel the ghost of a loving, dominating hand on the back of his neck.

“Eames,” Annabel says, the daughter of dreamless sleeps. “If you need help-”

“I don't,” he replies, somehow.

It cracks out of him like a bullet from a rusty gun, hurts himself more than his misaligned target.

She recoils all the same, but it is a judging look that mars her features. A cold one.

“Do you think you're the first person to lose everything?” she asks.

Eames would look away in shame, if he had the capacity for it anymore. If he ever had it at all.

He holds her stare with defiance, unyielding.

Annabel, eyes as blue as tears.

She slides a vial across the table they share, a nudge of fingers. There's a scar on her wrist that he's never seen before, flash of white over her thin blue veins.

Eames looks at the glass cap, a thimbleful of healing.

Annabel returns to her work without further comment. Leaves as night creeps through the windows and Eames is alone.

Almost.

A hand, fingers touching the cord of his spine like a scalpel’s edge.

“Don't,” that soft, soothsay voice warns him.

In a shuddering act of demanding wilfulness, Eames snatches up the vial and leaves, papers strewn untidily across the table. He tries to relish the knowledge that in the morning, they will still be exactly as he left them.

He returns to his hotel room. Falls asleep still dressed on the covers, the sealed vial still in his sweaty hand.

.

.

In Tuscany, on the third Tuesday, there is a moment in time that lapses, centrefold amidst Eames’ scoured memories.

He's en route to meet with Crowley, whose tyrannical mood has only increased in the lead up to the job, when his phone starts ringing.

Eyeing the number with alarm, he answers jovially, swerving in the pavement to avoid a street vendor.

“Darling, I'm almost home,” he says, hoping it's enough to get Arthur's attention.

If it is, he doesn't acknowledge Eames’ warning.

 _“Don't go to Staroni’s,”_  Arthur says.

Eames’ walk, already barely quick enough to be considered a stroll, slows almost to a halt.

“Why?” he asks, ducking into a snicket that's lined with shaded tables for overpriced tourist traps.

 _“I've found something,”_  Arthur says, most unhelpfully.

Eames huffs as loudly as he dares.

“Well, care to share with the class?” he mutters through gritted teeth.

He can taste the sweat on Arthur's lip through the ragged tear of his breaths.

He's been increasingly agitated for the past three days and Eames, he feels like he's been walking among bear traps the whole time.

 _“Go back to the cafe you tailed Anita to last week,”_  Arthur orders.

So as to avoid saying something too biting in retort, Eames starts with a gentle laugh and says,

“Arthur, darling, if I get there and find a body-”

 _“This is not the time, Eames,”_ Arthur barks, the way he used to, before he laughed at Eames’ teasing instead of letting it fuel his churlishness.

Eames feels paranoia snake around his windpipe, laced with none too small a measure of annoyance.

His feet, however, have already started walking in the direction of the cafe.

Eames isn't sure when exactly he signed over autonomy of his body to Arthur's force, but it's happened, and he doesn't know if he'll ever get it back.

(Doesn't know if he really wants it back, to be honest, but that's a separate matter entirely.)

 _“Stay there until I get to you,”_ Arthur continues, presumptuous as ever.

“Arthur-” Eames begins, hoping to follow up with some vague reassurance he shouldn't be prepared for a shoot-out, all jokes be damned.

Arthur, apparently, considers this some grand final straw. He hisses, with the kind of vehemence Eames is absolutely certain he doesn't deserve,

_“Eames for once in your life, do as you're fucking told.”_

Then he puts the phone down, not even waiting for Eames to say something suitably facetious in return.

Belittled reprimands curdling in his gut, Eames storms cloudy through central Lucca, and his mood further darkens when he gets to the cafe to find it packed.

Stewing in his hot disgruntlement, Eames drinks three iced teas, a strawberry milkshake and a Peroni, while resentment festers like a wound in his lung.

_Do as you're fucking told._

If Eames had made a meal of encouraging his daddy issues, he thinks to himself sullenly, that would be his absolute hardball trigger.

He thinks about Alice, the burn scar on her back that nobody else knows about. At least, nobody still alive to confess.

By the time Arthur gets there, Eames has moved past petty and is comfortably sitting in abject, righteous contempt.

By the time Arthur arrives, a trip in his step that might be pleasure though could just as easily be adrenaline, Eames’ mood is so foul he's surprised Arthur can't scent it in the air.

Just as Arthur takes a seat at the table, his face flushed and his eyes sex bright sparkling, a look that usually precedes some rather intimate bruises in sun shy places on Eames’ body, Eames stands up.

His chair is loud scraping over the floor, loud enough to get Arthur's attention for the first time.

And Arthur's face, puppy proud, it only darkens the clouds swirling in Eames’ head.

“Don't do that again,” he says bitterly, then stalks out of the cafe, readying himself for an earful from Crowley and still short of a plausible excuse as to why he missed their check-in.

.

.

Arthur doesn't follow.

Then again, Eames wouldn't expect him to right away.

.

.

(No, that comes later, like always.)

.

.

A year and a half after the Fischer Job, when Arthur is stupid, which is rare and surprising, Eames tells him to  _fuck off_  and goes out to a bar for a drink that turns into seven.

He comes back, not to the fight he's spoiling for, but to red rubbed eyes and a shrivelled up sullenness that pervades the apartment like smog.

Arthur's sitting on the sofa, flicking through the limited channels on the TV, even though he doesn't speak a word of Finnish.

He's wearing a jumper that definitely doesn't belong to him.

Actually, Arthur's threatened to throw this jumper out several times, owing to the frayed hem of one sleeve and only Eames’ threats of retaliatory suit damage have kept it safe.

Arthur is looking at him with cow brown eyes as he mumbles an apology that doesn't suit him at all, that makes Eames’ insides squirm with discomfort.

Arthur, he apologises like he's distraught. Like Eames didn't blatantly overreact and like this isn't just a stupid fight, the kind Eames always enjoys with partners.

The kind Eames had sort of assumed would be a regular feature of any kind of relationship between two co-workers who have successfully imitated the human example of chalk and cheese for quite literally years.

Eames is surprised by this chastised, hurting animal that Arthur has kept hidden before now. The way he curves in spindles on the sofa and looks at his hands squeezing together, nervous like nothing that could really kill him ever does.

And yet, the more Eames thinks about it, beer bubbles sagging in his belly and the fight disappearing from his knotted muscles, he thinks maybe he shouldn't be surprised.

After all, of the two of them, Eames isn't the one with crippling abandonment issues and a thirst for approval that outranks most six year olds.

Eames isn't the one who for two years stuck by an erstwhile friend who offered nothing more than endangerment and under-appreciation, just because the alternative was not having that friend at all.

Sighing very quietly, Eames sits on the sofa and tugs with firm hands until most of Arthur's wriggling, humiliated weight is settled cat-curl on his torso and lap. His fingers thread through wax-sticky hair and he can taste salt on Arthur's forehead when he kisses it.

Arthur heaves a breath, face buried in Eames’ sternum and hands bruising his waist.

“Sorry,” Eames thinks Arthur says, cloth muffled and badly spelled.

“Sshh,” Eames says, the relished anger leaking out of him along with the buzz of alcohol.

He kisses Arthur's face again, head tilted at a stressfully awkward angle to reach his damp cheekbone.

“Daft sod,” he whispers.

Arthur makes a throaty sound, heavy as a sob and pale as laughter.

They lie on the sofa for almost an hour.

When they get up, the embarrassment lingers like stars in Arthur's eyes, although the rest of his face is steely calm.

Eames thumbs his lower lids, kisses each lip in turn, then the bridge of his nose.

“I love you,” he says, which is honestly a terrible apology. Arthur, however, doesn't seem to notice.

His expression, sunbeams in the nutcrack sky.

“I love you, too,” he says, and he sounds surprised. Whether by the words or the truth of them, Eames can't tell.

He laughs, and so does Arthur.

“You daft sod,” Eames says again, and the world whites out to only this precise moment, as bright and powerful as the glancing of a blade.

.

.

Eames left London full of the grave worms of his dying familial loyalty.

When he comes back, the corpse is still fresh.

.

.

Eames wakes up, splayed spread eagle.

His heart jackrabbit and his cock jackhammer.

He breathes into the pillow, the faux freshness of it, that hotel smell.

He flexes his arms and a small glass vial rolls off his lax fingers to the floor.

His shirt is soaked and his trousers are tight and his shoes are strangling his toes.

Bleary, fog stare. Through his wet gummy eyelashes he can see the shape of a man, his head and his shoulders.

(His knees and his toes.)

Eames stares at the figure, at his soapy blur of features and the dry turn of his head.

“My love,” he murmurs into the lambskin blankness of daybreak.

Closes his eyes, opens them.

He's alone.

.

.

The facts are cold, unmalleable.

(Arthur always liked facts, they were trustworthy and true.)

Five men.

No, five animals.

Five animals are paid to go to New Hampshire. To break into a house guarded only by gates and sunflowers, to the two faggots holed up in their little slice of devil’s heaven.

Five is not much, not for them. Not in their prime.

Only, their prime is passed. Or, rather, their prime has been amended.

Their prime is softer now. They are loose limbed, cushioned by the arrogance of their cocooned safety.

Five is a lot when one is stripped to the flesh and the other is tied to the table legs. When the five are hungry and nasty and in love with the gushing adrenaline of their newfound power.

.

.

They take their time, they are complacent, they are too many.

.

.

Arthur is silent, until he is not.

.

.

“I can help,” the un-Lee says and she is starling scatter glowing.

She watches him with the caution of a mother and the absent mistrust of a child.

Eames avoids her stare, and Arthur's, too.

The vial sits in his pocket, next to his godfather’s dogtags and the poker chip that everyone thinks it so fucking important.

.

.

(It is, it really is, but not for the reasons they all assume.)

.

.

The facts are these:

Five animals break into a house.

Two men die, though only one stays dead.

There is a 911 call courtesy of a neighbour who hears the screaming as she's out walking the dogs.

There is a dedicated paramedic who won't be given the credit he deserves for saving a dead man's life.

.

.

The fact is this: Arthur lied.

.

.


	7. Seventh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Friends,
> 
> I know this one seemed abandoned, but I just got a bit lost. I found a crumpled up map though, and am back on my way! A shortish chapter to ease you (and me) back in.
> 
>  **Tags have been updated and should be taken seriously.** There are lots of references, however non-explicit most of them are, to child abuse in this chapter. 
> 
> Yours,  
> LRCx

_Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides._

_~ André Malraux_

.

.

There is a place between adoration and downfall, and that is where Eames left his heart.

Plucked it out of his chest, scarred up weary, and laid it in the riverbed of all the plans he made, left to drown.

That is the place where his projections wander, aimless as the hurricane that knows nothing but its own self-inflicted wrath. That is the place where he might find an answer, to a question he refuses to ask.

.

.

In Lucca, Arthur wakes Eames up from a well-deserved nap to tell him that their extractor is far more morally reprehensible than they thought.

He trembles in their shared bed and Eames runs his hands up and down the glacier crevasse of his spine through his shirt and they tell each other they will be smart about this, they’ll be sensible.

“We don’t know she’d be in danger,” Eames says, aiming for devil’s advocate and coming up culprit of by-stander mentality.

“If we give him this, even in a dream,” Arthur says, his voice squeezed out of the swelling of his throat, “She’ll never be safe. Once he’s. After we. He won’t stop.”

His cheeks are hot and dry, his nose in the dip of Eames’ collar bone; they’re both uncomfortably warm and reluctant to do anything about it.

Eames presses his closed mouth against Arthur’s forehead, his hair tickling his nose, and his hands keep up their crosspatch pace over the lines of his back.

Sometimes, not very often, Eames remembers the stark and prideful way Arthur said, _I have a sister._

The slapped look on his face when Eames replied, _Not anymore you don’t._

He’s never looked, because he’s never wanted to know that corner of Arthur’s life, not by any means other than from Arthur’s lips. The truth is, he thinks he probably doesn’t need to look, nor need to be told.

Arthur’s limbs are steel rods in his arms and the jarring vibration of his shiver as he burrows deeper into Eames’ side finds all the spaces of Eames untouched and scours them with possessive, punishing love. Shafts of sunlight in the cracks of a dusty attic.

“If Crowley thinks we’re backing out, he’ll cut us loose and find someone else,” he says.

Arthur knows this already.

Undoubtedly, he had already run up and down every possible avenue and cross-referenced his own plans in his head long before he reached the hotel room.

Arthur’s never needed a gun in his hand to be anything other than lethal.

“We’re not backing out,” he says. “We’re still doing the job.”

Eames stares up at the ceiling, at the textured paint that reveals the heavier joists in its long seams and waits for Arthur to continue.

“We have to tell Anita Collins,” he says.

Eames’ hands dig deeper into the muscles of Arthur’s back in surprise, nails scoring his skin. He takes a slow, quiet breath as he mulls that monstrosity over.

“Tell her what?”

Arthur’s eyes find his, his irises thin and dark, an unfriendly hardness there, that doesn’t belong in a face of dimpled smiles.

“We tell her what her stepfather is capable of,” he says, like it’s the most obvious solution in the world.

Eames has been tailing Anita Collins for days now. His sleeping pattern has been royally fucked thanks to her unfailing reserves of energy and her nocturnal liveliness.

He has watched her trot through the streets of her home city, immersed in her adopted tongue and the fluttering skirt; the sandal toe freshness of Tuscany air.

He imagines what it would be to approach her, what it would take to convince her, beyond any and all reasonable doubt, the danger young Cami is in. Imagines burdening her with knowledge that cannot be withdrawn.

To that very same end, though, is the cheerful, lamplight smile of Camilla Staroni. Her brightly coloured headbands and the skip of her walk when she’s got a bottle of coke in her hands, traipsing after her stepsister like she’s the piper of Lucca.

“Alright,” he says.

Arthur’s fingers are steady over his torso, his thumbs rubbing circles into bruises.

His gratitude, silently deafening.

.

.

He’s a periphery now, as he never was.

He is the silver darting light where sunlight hits the glass of the sea.

Eames sees him, his inconstant and ever-present whispering of existence.

“You’re not real,” he tells him.

“I was,” Arthur replies, hoarse; there are fingerprints where his throat was pale and smooth, and the scent of his cologne never faded.

Eames might touch him. The ridge of his cheekbone and the dip of his cupid’s bow; the blood on his chin.

“Not anymore,” Eames tells him, and his eyes are penny bright.

He wakes up, and Arthur’s still there.

He’s stopped counting Thursdays.

.

.

Arthur dies late in the mist between one day and the next. Quiet branches of time unfold, blue lights and plastic oxygen.

Eames wakes up and Henry tells him, _You’re a stupid fuck,_ and the seasons are as insignificant as they have ever been.

.

.

Eames learned to forge from a man called Beria, which was the source of plenty of Eames’ humour for the duration of their friendship.

Beria was a strangely scrupulous confidence man who learned dream-forging from one of the military’s first.

Eames was his second pupil, seven years after his first.

“You mustn’t hold onto them, son,” he said, more than once. “Every time a forge is finished with, you must burn it out of your head. It doesn’t do to have so many people scratching at the walls of your skull.”

He called him that. _Son._ He was twenty years Eames’ senior, a character of wrought iron and seashell wit.

His dreams were serious; more so than most of the fanciful designers and builders out there.

It was as if he knew the worst already, and he taught it to Eames, every precaution of the evils he might do himself, skinning imaginary figures and slipping inside them like suits of armour.

He died by his own hand, the day after his fiftieth birthday, two days after his only daughter succumbed to the collapsing of her lungs.

He taught Eames plenty, and Eames’ gratitude extended as far as a graveside visit.

Eames placed daffodils at the foot of the grave. Whispered a Hail Mary, the only prayer left on his tongue from his days at St Edmund’s, and felt better for it afterwards.

He supposed that was the point of religion.

.

.

Arthur dies late, in the mist between Wednesday and Thursday.

The seasons are insignificant.

Eventually, Eames stops counting Thursdays.

.

.

He dreams about the forest fire he saw as a boy.

Or read about, or heard about.

He dreams about a forest fire. The smell of old bark scorched to nothing, the fumes of parched leaves and dead badgers and an old tyre swing worn thin with scuffed feet and a den made of tarp and twine.

He dreams of the way the nesting chaffinches screeched and the fox cubs screamed and the conifers wept.

The sound of Michael Hitherly’s mother’s knees hitting the dirt as she grabbed fistfuls of grass and garbled out great lungfuls of grief in her front garden when they told her he wasn’t coming back.

“That’s enough now, Jamie,” Henry told him, a hand on his shoulders; comforting, but for the bite of his strong fingertips.

.

.

When Eames is old enough to understand and young enough to be frightened, he sees blood on his sister’s back and her head ducked into the bowl of the toilet and he doesn’t tell Henry because she begs him not to and he doesn’t tell mum because he thinks she knows already.

Alice tells him to forget and he promises her he will, but he doesn’t.

When he looks at her now, he still sees the torn bits of her fingernails splayed on the bathroom floor.

.

.

Once, Eames drinks enough wine to make the ghosts wisp to smoke, and Arthur’s face is only a blur of shapeless memory, and that's when he asks Dom what he thinks of first when he thinks of Mallorie.

In the morning, he doesn’t remember Dom’s answer.

Perhaps he didn’t give one.

.

.

Eames stays in London as long as he must, as long as England can contain him.

Henry’s got a couple of bulldogs on him. Eames doesn’t give them the slip and he pretends for his own fragile ego it’s because he’s feeling generous, and not because he’s too injured to be sure he’d be successful.

He gets on a train to Birmingham and it’s pulling in at Long Buckby, with its slack tile roofs and stubby cottage heights, when Jonny calls.

He’s too tired not to pick up.

“What?” he says when he picks up, antsy hollow throat, and the girl in the seat across the aisle shoots him a half-look that isn’t half as surreptitious as she probably thinks over her book.

_“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”_

He’s never quite mastered Henry’s gravitas, the voice of a terrier in a cage. He was always the scrappiest of the four boys.

He could never bring Eames to heel, and he learned very quickly what would happen if he tried to curb Alice’s whims.

“Why are you so interested?” he retorts coolly.

_“Because you’re my little brother, and you have been stabbed three times by bloody Americans, you tosser. Go home.”_

Eames might actually believe his concern, if it wasn’t for the fact that when he was sixteen, Jonny outed him to his sixth form and then denied all knowledge of the consequences.

“Henry’s boys are more than capable of bringing me back if he’s so worried,” Eames replies. “Don’t you have papers to staple, or whatever it is you do for him these days?”

 _“Jamie,”_ Jonny says, that brokers-no-negotiation voice that has bought Henry more trouble than trade over the years. _“Don’t be such a sodding idiot. If you get on a plane back to the States now, there’s nothing we can do to stop them finding you again.”_

Eames has had enough of trying to explain just how unlikely it is his life is in danger.

He’s almost surprised by Jon’s assumption. He hasn’t really been thinking about what plane he’s going to get on, only that he won’t be trapped on this penny farthing island this time tomorrow.

“Tell Alice I’ll see her at Christmas,” he says instead.

 _“Tell the tart yourself,”_ Jonny snaps, a little more agitated than before

Eames doesn’t respond to it. Alice has happily lived pitted against her brothers’ disdain for years. He isn’t required to stand up for her titanium pride.

At his silence, his brother lets out a fast, sharp sigh. When he speaks, his voice is uncomfortably nasty.

 _“Jam,”_ he says, for the first time in years. _“You can’t bow out of this one.”_

When their father died, Henry was the only sibling to shed a tear. Eames can still recall perfectly the way Jon emptied two entire bottles of Grey Goose over the grave, hoping to stop the grass from growing too nicely.

Before that, though, when Eames left England with no intention of returning, their father told him not to bother coming back and Jonny laughed when Eames expressed how glad he was that they finally found something to agree on.

The train rattles out of the station and up ahead, the conductor is checking tickets.

The girl across the aisle is doing a piss poor job of not looking interested in Eames’ phone call.

“I’m not bowing out,” he replies.

Despite his best efforts, he chokes on his words anyway and has to drop the rest of his sentence. He no longer feels quite so recently stabbed-three-times, but his breaths are short and exhaustion is thickening the blood struggling through his veins.

_“Jamie –”_

“Jon, please, just for once, please stop,” Eames says in a burst, his face all but pressed flat to the window. “Call Henry’s boys back. Let me go. I want to go.”

He never fell in love with the family life like Jonny, nor the family business like Henry did, nor the family home like Oliver.

Eames never fell in love with anything until he saw a Toulouse-Lautrec in person. He never fell in love with anyone until he came home drunk and angry to find Arthur wearing his jumper watching Finnish reality TV with red-rimmed eyes.

 _You don’t know what loneliness feels like, do you?_ Arthur asked him, once, and Eames didn’t then, but now, it’s the only thing he feels at all.

On the other end of the phone, Jon is silent but his reluctance is loud.

Eames takes a steadying breath. It shudders in his chest as piece by piece he reclaims control of his voice and he doesn’t need to look around to know the girl across the aisle is still watching him over his book.

Out of the window, he watches a power station chug out fumes and steam in a long puff of clouds.

Eventually, he gathers together his magpie chatter thoughts, enough to say, to Jon’s resounding reluctance,

“I know you can stop me, if you really want. But Jonny, if ever there was a time to pay me back for getting bricked by your rugby team, this is it.”

The train conductor brushes past them, looking from face to face and tapping the scanner in her hand with her pen. Eames glances up, catches her eye and her distracted, polite half-smile.

She has a kind face, that suits her Brummy twang and laugh, which he’d head up and down the train twice. Just as she passes, Jonny replies,

_“Henry will have my balls.”_

“Henry will be relieved,” Eames corrects. It’s probably true. It’s a path of roadblocks, the one he’s walked with his eldest brother. There were times when Henry’s opinion was the only one that mattered. Nowadays, Eames struggles to remember what it felt like to simply not hate him.

 _“Alice will kill you if you don’t come back for Christmas,”_ Jonny adds.

Eames laughs, a small, sodden sound.

Alice won’t really care, but she’ll take any excuse to lay into him.

“Tell the little tart to stop fucking Henry’s security,” he says.

 _“She is never,”_ Jonny exclaims, aghast, and there’s a brush of amusement between them. Eames feels his stomach muscles loosen, just enough, and his breaths come deeper.

 _“Just don’t get stupid, Jamie,”_ Jonny says.

“Don’t get soft, Jonny,” Eames replies.

He’s not sure which of them puts the phone down first.

By the time they’ve passed through Coventry, the two men three tables down the carriage has disappeared.

.

.

Birmingham airport isn’t too crowded.

The first flight out is to Dubai, which isn’t even an option anyway.

The twenty-third is to Paris.

.

.


	8. Eighth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darlings,
> 
> **Tags check them check the tags.**
> 
> Yours,  
> LRCx

_Most of the time, thank goodness, we suffer quite stupidly and unreflectingly, like animals._

_~ Christopher Isherwood_

 

.

.

There’s a little girl called Camilla who was born in a small hospital on the outskirts of Lucca.

She lives in Switzerland now, with her stepsister, whose name is Anita. They are hidden away, secreted by hills and borders and firewalls.

“Promise me you aren’t going to interfere,” Eames told Arthur, in the dusty heart of Tuscany. “If we do this, you can’t go back and interfere later.”

“I promise,” Arthur said, and Eames didn’t ask again.

When he thinks back on it later, he knows there’d have been no point in asking again, because it would just have been another chance for Arthur to lie.

.

.

When the plane touches down at the airport, there’s a rough jolt of the wheels, the rapid deceleration running through his clenched muscles, vibrating against the brittle hollow of his bones.

Eames tightens his fist around a pair of dogtags that don’t belong to him. The gift of a godfather he hasn’t seen in a decade or more.

The lull of French in the announcements from the Captain is as soothing as the bite of metal in the delicate groove of his palm. Eames falls into the sound of it, the steely hurt of it.

Beside him, there’s a girl gripping her knees. Her shoulders are trembling. Even once the plane has rattled to a glacial rumble, her shaking remains.

She must be no older than eighteen; slender, bunched into her thick, hooded jumper, white buds of earphones sticking out of the neckline like limp antennas. Eames looks at her, watches closely as the corners of her mouth pinch inwards, revealing soft dimples in her cheeks.

The plane rolls in a lazy ninety-degree angle, the passengers restless, raring to leapt out of their seats, their eyes on the taunting of the glowing seatbelts icon. Somewhere down the plane, the little boy who had bust into tears at take-off is asking in half-whimpers for his mum.

Eames puts his hand on the arm rest between himself and the trembling girl, just close enough to catch her line of sight.

Her head, covered in a bundle of flyaway caramel and lilac curls, turns towards him, so that he can see the pink damp of her brown eyes. She brings her trembling hands in towards her torso, shy and worried.

“Can I help?” he asks, and he sees the surprise in the upturn of her eyebrows, and the slipped cupid’s bow of her mouth.

She looks at his hand, then slowly up to his face.

“It’s stupid,” she says, shaking her head and withdrawing further into her seat.

About them, the first of the restless passengers are getting up too soon, as if their haste will speed up the plane’s journey.

“It’s not,” Eames replies, with gentle honestly.

“Yes, it is,” the girl says, smearing the tears out of her clumped eyelashes with rough slaps of her hands. “It’s a sh-short flight. Nothing to. Nothing to be scared of.”

This last comes with a timid yowl of laughter, humiliation that she doesn’t deserve, but is exacting upon herself with all too familiar vengeance.

Eames smiles at her, offering the bleak deprecation she’s seeking, before shaking his head in disagreement.

“There’s nothing stupid about being afraid,” he tells her, and a year ago he’d have said the same, only it would have been a token platitude to soften the embarrassment of a crying teenager.

It’s not hollow, now. Not anymore. There’s truth to it, or perhaps better said, hope to it. It’s as important to Eames that it’s true as it is to the eighteen-year-old girl hiding in her hoodie as tears slide down to her jaw beside him.

“Thanks,” she whispers into her damp sleeves.

By the time the plane comes to a standstill, she’s stopped trembling, and her eyelashes are dry as she wraps the undercoat of lilac curls in her hair around her fingers. Her smile, timid, radiant as starlight.

.

.

 _Did you honestly think I was anywhere near done with you?_  Arthur asked in the foyer of his Pasadena block of flats.

It was adoring, confident, trusting. It spoke of a future that they deserved, one that was theirs for the taking.

Eames reached with both hands and took all he could.

And then, later, when Arthur was gone, he took that future with him, unreachable.

Try as he might, Eames can’t bring himself to look for it elsewhere.

.

.

Eames goes to the Castille, because it’s one of the ones they never got around to staying in.

He’s sentimental, but he isn’t suicidal. Not to mention, he’s still on Henry’s budget.

It’s sheer and shiny, fresh flowers filling the air with the honey butter sweet of their stem cut pollen. There’s poise to this hotel, a regal sense of nostalgia that appeals to the pre-revolutionary, to that grandeur the French so seem to revile and regale with defiance.

Eames checks in under the name James Marsh, booked for three weeks.

It’s tedious, in its own way. He’s never much liked Parisians, nor cared for the idle ego of Paris as a city.

Arthur always found it romantic, the space in its streets, the pale of its stone, the elegance of its inhabitants. Eames finds it pretentious, did as a boy and does as a man.

(He’s getting good at it already, past-tensing a person who has been his present for so long he had started to think that’s how it always had been.)

He checks in soon after midday. Goes straight for the bed, barely kicking off his shoes and sliding his belt out of its loops before he’s crawling into the covers, face squashed under the pillow and the duvet up to his scalp.

It’s cool and dark in the room, prickling over his skin and pressing into the disquiet of his mind, laying claim to his busy thoughts. Sleep comes surprisingly easy, then. The unfamiliarity of the bed, the generic lavender laundry smell, the faint hum of the city outside the suicide-proof window. It’s comforting, in all its newness, untouched before by Eames or by anyone else he knows.

He is as anonymous as he’ll ever be, here, and he sinks into that like fog spread heavy over the lip of an early tide.

.

.

_Close your eyes. Don’t look. Close your eyes._

.

.

Her fox red hair over blue butter eyes, saying,  _Whatever it is that you can see that the rest of us can't._

Arthur, behind her, a shadow in the corner of Eames’ eye, the lyrics to a song he can’t remember ever hearing.

.

.

When Eames thinks about Arthur, now, it’s the stain of blood on his lips and the colour of another man’s handprints on his waist.

.

.

It’s a short walk from the Castille to the Seine. Eames walks it every day for a week, a lazy stroll before breakfast, which he has at the same overpriced café every morning just before the tourist rush really starts.

The croissants are flaky, the coffee brewed to perfection, the waiting staff are rude. Eames imagines, for ten indulgent seconds, on the third day, writing a postcard to Arthur about it.

That day, he goes back to his room and sleeps the day away with pills and water in reach on both sides of the bed.

On the eighth day, he doesn’t make it past the hotel lobby.

He has every intention of continuing as he’s begun, but he is brought to a quick and quarrelling stop by the sight that presents itself.

Sitting on a glossy leather sofa on the other side of the room from the reception, his forearms on his knees and his hands clasped between them, looking for all the world like he’s been there all his life, is Dominick Cobb.

When their eyes meet, Eames is hyperaware of three horribly important things.

First, that standing a few metres away is maybe the only other person in the world who could possibly understand what Eames has lost. Second, that Cobb looks like he hasn’t slept in a fortnight. And third, that Eames isn’t ready to talk to him yet, and maybe won't ever be.

Their eyes meet, and at one flashing blink of that bright blue sympathy, Eames turns around and walks straight back into the lift he just vacated.

There’s nobody else inside, and he punches the embossed  _6_ hard with the knuckle of his index finger three times.

The doors are almost entirely closed when Cobb gets there, hits the sliding metal hard and steps inside as soon as there’s a big enough gap, looking as unapologetic as he’s ever looked in his life for his brashness.

Eames has never despised Cobb, not even when he was at his most duplicitous. It was difficult to despise anything quite that pathetic; the frantic inelegance of how he’d approached Eames in Mombasa for the Fischer Job is ingrained in Eames’ mind, as is the very real  _pity_ he’d felt for the man.

Right now, however, as the lift doors shut behind him with a clanging ping, Eames does despise him.

For a moment, as the lift starts to rumble and move, they simply stare at each other.

Cobb’s never been particularly intimidating, not physically at least. He might have a bit of height on Eames, but Eames hasn’t gotten this far in life by comparing inches, and he’s always known even on a bad day he could take Cobb down if he wanted.

This isn’t a bad day, though. This is a catastrophe of months. This is weeks of Eames disintegrating into loose atoms and he has neither the means nor the energy to put up a fight against anyone, least of all someone who can find emotional pressure points like they’re homing beacons, who has made a living destabilising the weakest points of a person, until they fold to his will.

Cobb stands in front of him with bags under his eyes, wearing a nice coat over a haphazard suit and he’s looking at Eames with the most unbearable sadness Eames has ever seen, the kind he recognises from every mirror he doesn’t manage to avoid.

There are mirrors in the lift, of course. There always are. There’s one on either side of them, and one behind Eames. He’s surrounded by reflections of himself, and of Cobb’s unwelcome empathy, and he’s about to drown in it, the cabin pressure mounting, stifling his lungs. He breaks, looks at the floor, out of sight out of mind, and his fists are tight by his side.

“Eames,” Cobb says, but it’s thick, letters like syrup, muted by the storm.

Eames closes his eyes, tries to hold onto the oxygen leaking out of him, tries to swallow the air trapped too deep in his lungs to escape.

“Eames, breathe,” Cobb says, unhelpful and troubled.

Before Eames can notice it enough to back away, there’s a hand on his shoulder, and there’s one on the back of his head, a strong grip, both of them, reassuring as a rider to a horse, and when he flinches his hands come up and shove hard, hard at a broad chest that doesn’t budge, not even when he fists the lapels of that nice, nice coat and rattles them like the handles of locked doors.

“Eames, it’s ok,” Cobb might say, or maybe he says something else, surely something else, because that’s a rotten lie and Eames has had enough lies to last him a lifetime.

His chest is bursting, as if the stitches are back, are unpicking themselves, as if the knife is cutting them open and teasing his flesh apart all over again. His lungs are burning like his eyes, like his throat, like his heart. His fingers feel brittle and broken grabbing onto Cobb’s coat, and that hand on his bowed head, warm and heavy, strong enough to pull him closer than he wants to be, than he can bear to be.

“Eames, I’m here,” Cobb says, like that isn’t the whole  _problem,_ like Eames wasn’t completely  _fine_ until he showed his uninvited face.

It’s only then that Eames realises he’s speaking; instead of air leaking out of him, it’s actually words. Long, drawn out whispers are issuing out of his mouth like the hiss of a burst pipe, he can taste them, taste them like carbon monoxide.

_Please please don’t go please just help please help me I need help I need your help I can’t do this I can’t do it anymore I can’t I don’t know what to do please help me –_

He tries to swallow them down, but he only chokes on them.

The lift comes to a stop, and there’s a horrible, gut-wrenching moment in which he thinks someone else is about to walk in on this frankly humiliating scene. Cobb’s hand tightens on his shoulder, but when the doors slide open behind him, the corridor is empty.

Eames tries to pull away from Cobb’s solid grip, but he’s breathless and shaking, and it takes only the tiniest of pulls from Cobb’s fingers to stumble him out of the closed mouth cave of metal and into the corridor. It’s warm, too warm, and Eames is singularly aware that the sticky heat of his face is the wet slide of tears running freely, unchecked down his cheeks.

There’s a rush of cool air on the back of his hand as Cobb lets go, and the fumbling in his pocket is obvious enough that at any other time Eames might scoff at Cobb’s less than light-fingered touch, but he doesn’t have the space for it.

Cobb pulls out the card for the room, and talks at the side of Eames’ head as if he actually thinks there’s a chance the forger is listening.

There’s a gulping black hole between standing outside the empty lift and sitting on the foot of the bed in his hotel room.

Eames can only assume he walked there himself, because he might have dropped half a stone but there’s no way Cobb has the upper body strength to have carried him. At least, he hopes not, because there’s shame, and then there’s the place at the end of the train tracks where Dominick Cobb carried him to his hotel room while he cried into his jacket.

All Eames knows is this: he was doing fine, and now Dom Cobb is kneeling before him, a ritual sacrifice, and he feels as if his universe has collapsed into a crushed piece of origami inside his chest.

Cobb’s still talking, and behind the emptiness of the words he’s got the right tone, a perfect pitch of melancholy strength. And if it’s the exact same tone of a father comforting a child as they emerge from the depths of a nightmare, well, Eames has endured worse.

His breath, though painful, is coming more regularly now; it might still feel like broken glass, but at least it doesn’t sound it.

Eames stares at his hands, fidgeting fingers in his lap, measuring his lungfuls in multiples of three, and eventually the room is silent.

Dom, staring at him from his kneel like he’s getting ready to propose, and an hysterical, choking laugh bursts out of Eames’ mouth. He presses his face into his open hands, flat over his eyes and cheeks and jaw.

It’s much easier, hiding in the dark of his closed eyelids. Cobb lets him, too, for several long minutes, letting a peaceful quietude take root beneath them, anchoring the most unstable parts of their shared foundation.

Eventually, though, Cobb must realise Eames will die of dehydration before willingly speaking first, because he clears his throat noisily and says,

“I’m sorry.”

There are undoubtedly any number of things that Dom Cobb has done in his life that merit an apology or seven, some of them even maybe to Eames. Except, for the life of him, Eames can’t think of a single one that bears any relevance to this precise moment in time.

“Whatever for?” he asks in a harsh, withdrawn voice.

He senses Cobb’s wince, relishes the vindictive pleasure of it.

Cobb sighs a little helplessly, and Eames opens his eyes only to look at the gold and tan wall above the man’s head; doesn’t want to see any softness in his face.

“For coming here,” Cobb says, although he makes it sound like a question instead of an answer. “For not coming sooner. For not being any help.”

Eames chuffs at him, tries to unpick anything more from his brief words but there’s nothing hiding in the lining of the cloak. Cobb really is just sorry.

It occurs to Eames that this is the first contact he’s had with any other dreamer since it happened.

It occurs to Eames that in a way, he has no idea what Cobb’s doing here.

“I didn’t even tell you,” he says, his voice mangling the words into something that is neither an apology nor an accusation, but rather a hybrid of both.

He thinks just in his line of sight he can see Cobb’s eyes narrowing at him.

“Well, you were in a coma for the first few days.”

Eames’ head snaps towards him before the notion fully registers.

Unsolicited and utterly unwelcome, the burdening image of Cobb there in the hospital with him comes forth.

Was he? How else would he know? Surely  _someone_ would have told him? A nurse, a doctor, the simpering psychologist they sent in to check he wasn’t going to off himself as soon as they cut him loose, because God forbid he take back a shred of autonomy over what happens to himself next.

Cobb is looking at him with a forlorn, cumbersome expression.

Worse yet, Eames realises, he might look rumpled and in need of a decent night’s sleep, but all in all, he looks  _good._ He looks healthy and hale and strong and absolutely everything that Eames doesn’t feel, he looks in command of his senses and he looks in control of his emotions and Eames is once again starting to begrudge the latches on the windows of his hotel room.

“Who?” he asks, even though he knows the answer, of course he does.

Who else would dare?

Cobb shifts a little, sitting back on his heels, wry and wretched.

“I got a call from your brother,” he says, in a voice that tells Eames all he needs to know about which brother it was. “He’s a real asshole, isn’t he?”

Eames nods, wishing he didn’t agree quite so thoroughly, and also wishing Cobb would get up off the damn floor, too.

“Did he tell you I was here?” he asks, glancing down at his hands as he pulls at the torn nail of his left thumb, teasing the corner of it from its nailbed.

Cobb’s mouth twists around a visible lie, first, before saying,

“I called him.”

In a flinch of surprise, Eames pulls too hard at the nail and it rips. Blood speckles up to the surface, and he sucks it away in annoyance. The scoop of nail is still attached, too far down his thumb to risk tugging without taking off the entire nail altogether. He nudges at it with unkind pressure, stinging down to the bone.

“Why?” he asks midway through a loud, shuddering breath.

He tries to calm the trembling in his shoulders, but he can’t quite make them obey.

“Because,” Cobb says, only this time his platitudes fail him. He makes an impatient, scoffing sound in his throat, and his hands flap around a bit before dropping back to his lap. “Jesus, you know why, Eames.”

A sound that was once a relative of laughter claws up Eames’ throat. He coughs it up and looks to the ceiling, closes his eyes against the sting and then swallows it back down against his gag reflex.

“You’re not going to pay him back by taking care of me, you tosser,” Eames snarls, but the words snag on his tongue and he trips up on the barb, cutting himself in the process.

And Cobb, a shark with an acute taste for blood, doesn’t even hesitate before striking.

“Say his name.”

Another of those clawed sounds digs its talons into Eames’ oesophagus.

“No.”

“Eames.”

“No.”

 “You have –”

“Please, Dom.”

This last barely trembles out of him, pale as the colour of Alice’s hair, as the scent of lilacs in June. Pale and precious and poisoned.

More to the point, Cobb listens to it. Cobb falls silent at the plea, and it should feel like a victory, but then why does it feel like Cobb has won? Eames squeezes his eyes shut, clenches his jaw, bares his teeth, but nothing conjures the strength that would be required for what Cobb asks of him.

Between them, the gap once filled by their common denominator seems to expand, what little that remains to bridge it seems insignificant in the wake of the violent destruction that has split their cause.

The unfairness of Eames’ accusation doesn’t make it any less true. Cobb isn’t going to pay off his debts by helping Eames, it doesn’t work like that. There’s no transferring credit here and Eames is not a gateway to absolution.

“Your brother did ask me to check you were taking your medication,” Cobb says in a twisted, self-effacing tone, a practiced  _if not that, then this_ voice.

Eames snorts.

“I’ve been medicating,” he replies, because transparency has never been his MO but there’s no lie he can tell Cobb that will be bought, not when evidence of his methods are scattered about his hotel room like signal flags flapping in a high sea wind.

“You have friends that can help,” Cobb says, after a moment’s hesitation. “It doesn’t have to be me. But you should know, I’m not offering because I owe it to Arthur.”

He watches for Eames’ flinch, and it’s a momentous victory of willpower that Eames doesn’t.

Unsurprisingly, just because Cobb genuinely wants to help, that doesn’t mean he won’t be a dick about it.

Eames blinks down at him, feeling not in the least bit more powerful for his height advantage, and the lack of chagrin in Cobb’s face is oddly comforting. After Henry’s kid-glove handling and Alice’s vulnerable avoidance for the past two months, to be looked at with some measure of genuine expectation is unexpectedly bolstering.

That doesn’t mean Eames is prepared to despise Cobb any less for it, and the ice in the breeze of his words leaves frost on his tongue as he says,

“Got a spare handbook on the violent deaths of loved ones I can borrow?”

Cobb does flinch, and the pleasure of it leaves Eames with a sick, hollow feeling in the reflex of his throat. He’s not entirely sure why Cobb assumed losing four fifths of his nerve would be enough to declaw him. Eames has never been anything less than a bully when he’s at his strongest, and downright nasty when he’s not.

It still doesn’t feel like a win, though.

Cobb’s eyes are sad as a hound’s and he looks like he wants to say something chastising but can’t quite bring himself to.

“I need you to go away now, Dom,” Eames says, very quietly, and it’s as much for Cobb’s sake as his own, acutely aware as he is that he has no idea what cruel diatribe might fall off his tongue next.

He looks at the window, the crystal sea blue of the sky a tall slit between the curtains, and he chokes on the peace of it.

Slowly, in wispy increments, a fluffy white cloud forms, scattered over the cerulean deep.

He hears the snip of the door at some point, hears the crack of Cobb’s voice to match his knees.

The room, empty, hungry like a cobra, a hollow and all-encompassing thing.

There’s a gulping black hole between sitting on the foot of his bed and waking up on the bathroom floor.

Eames can only assume he got there himself.

When he finds his way back to the window, the sun is dipping into the western sky.

.

.

_Whatever it is that you can see, it's killing you._

.

.

When he goes downstairs, Cobb’s there again, still looking for all the world like he’s been there all his life.

This time, Eames makes it all the way into the lobby. He stands next to the sofa and Cobb gets to his feet, brushing imaginary dust from his trousers and giving Eames an indiscreet onceover. He must pass the necessary first-glance tests, because Cobb nods.

Then he looks Eames in the eye, the subconscious' only natural predator.

“I doubt there’d be much crossover in our reading material, even if there was,” he says. “I’m going to have dinner in a restaurant a few blocks from here. If you’re still in the mood to lash out, let me know and I’ll make sure to get one of the private tables.”

He strolls out of the front doors without checking to see if Eames is following; his gait is returning-tourist-slow, his hands are in his pockets and his head is held high to catch the bronze glint of the windows.

.

.

Perhaps it’s just been a long time since they worked together, but Eames is taken aback by the reminder, by the indisputable proof.

There’s a reason Cobb always got away with calling himself the best.

Sometimes, the brilliance isn't in the cleverness of the plan, only the stubbornness of the executor.

.

.

When Eames asked, wine stained, all those months later, and Cobb scooped him up like melted butter from a pan off the floor, he grimaced and hunched his shoulders in bleak defence.

 _She landed legs first,_ he replied, and he didn’t get any further than that.

.

.

A man, standing with a foot on the delicate back of Arthur’s neck, pressing hard enough that his entire body shakes in rebellion against the pressure.

“You lost Crowley a lot of money, cocksucker,” he says, a conversational punctuation as the barrel of his pistol runs slowly down the valley of his spine.

Arthur doesn’t reply. His eyes, burning starshine Fahrenheit into Eames’.

“Don’t look,” he whispers, under the weight of half a man.

Eames tries, but he can’t even bring himself to blink.

.

.


End file.
